Home Depot

Home Depot Customer Service

A week ago I wrote about our washing machine healing itself for the second time and almost buying a new one. This link will take you the long winded story, but to sum up, on a Monday I ordered a washing machine from Homedepot.com and on Wednesday I called to cancel the order. The CSR assured me the order would be cancelled and my money refunded in 7 to 10 business days.

So of course on Thursday morning they hit the charge card for $598. Of that, $50 of this was for them to haul off the old machine. So I called the customer service number, but the wait time was going to be pretty long, so I chose the option of the text chat. Below is an excerpt:

  • CSR: Excellent! Thank you so much for your order number Brian! I do see that since the order is in transit the cancellation is pending however as soon it arrives to the warehouse the cancellation will be processed for you Brian! I do apologize for the delay this is causing you today!
  • Me: So you can guarantee that I won’t have delivery service show up at my door tomorrow with a washing machine?
  • CSR: Absolutely! I checked out delivery team page just to be sure and your delivery is cancelled Brian! I also post a note on the delivery team page to make sure that it is not delivered for you!

Not longer than an hour after my text chat I got a phone message from Temco Logistics, the delivery agent for Home Depot, informing me that I would get a 4 hour window for delivery and a 30 minutes heads up before the truck arrives. There was a phone number to call if I had any questions. I called it and of course got an answering machine. I left a message, “Please do not deliver this item tomorrow as I have cancelled the order.”

Once again, no surprise, at 1:30 Friday afternoon I got a call from an unfamiliar number that I didn’t answer. The driver of the truck delivering my cancelled washing machine left a message that they were 30 minutes away. I called the number right back and predictably it went to the answering machine. When the truck pulled up I greeted them with the bad news and said, “Sorry you had to make the trip for nothing.” The driver replied, “No worries, it happens more often than you think.”

Wednesday two days ago, which by my count was the tenth business day, I checked the charge card to see if the money was credited back and it was, but only the $50 haul away fee. The $548 wasn’t there, so it was back to the Home Depot Customer Service phone lines. The CSR informed me that I was only on day 9 and I should probably call again on Friday (today) if I don’t see the refund.

The money was still not there. I’ve called this number so many times at this point that I knew witch numbers to hit after the robot picks up to get me to the right section. And this time I got a CSR who did some research instead of just reading something off the menu. Turns out that the cancellation never got to the right people the first time. Even though the HD website didn’t say the washing machine was shipped it was in transit from a distribution warehouse to the delivery agent. Now, the reason the money hasn’t been refunded yet is that the washing machine has yet to be returned to the distribution warehouse. So this CSR says that it should be getting there today and then there will be a 5 working day gap until I get the rest of my money. So we’ll see what happens next Friday.

Spatial Recognition Test

List the following items from the picture above in order of size from small to large:
Truck, SUV, shopping cart, Miata.

1.
2.
3.
4.

21.7 miles around town mopping up our weekly shopping.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 37

 

Hammered Copper

When we first bought our current bed frame it was because we really liked the shade of green of the one on the display floor. The trouble was that the one on the floor was already spoken for, the person had paid for it, but hadn’t picked it up yet. The only other colors they had were a brown and a white.

We picked white with the intention to paint it a color that would approximate the green we saw in the store. We went to Home Depot and got some paint chips of the color we thought it was, but when we compared it to frame in the store, nothing came close. Instead of painting the bed frame we picked one of those shades of green that we could agree on and painted the bedroom walls with it. Some time later after watching too much HGTV we turned the wall the bed sat against a darker shade of the same green family to create an accent wall.

After last week’s “over the bed” art print purchase, we thought that maybe we needed to repaint that accent wall. The forest scene had a lot of dark greens in it and it might get lost on the dark green wall, so we went back to Home Depot and picked up a quart of the lightest shade from the same family to cover it. Now fearing that the while bed would get lost in the light colored accent wall, we picked up 3 spray cans of Rust-Oleum Hammered Copper paint for the bed frame.

Earlier this week I parked both cars outside, laid down a giant tarp and placed all the bed frame pieces on it. I used up almost all of the three cans of paint on just one side of the parts. I did get two coats on them though. And because I tried to get as much of the sides I ended up covering two thirds of all the surfaces. I was looking pretty good and the only down side was that the index finger on my right hand was extremely sore. So much so that I was experimenting with using my left hand, but I was awful at it.

The following day we returned to Home Depot to buy a few more cans of paint and a little something else that was needed if I was going to be pressing a spray nozzle at all, because my right index finger hurt and was practically numb, a High Performance Comfort Spray Grip Accessory. And man, this thing is cool, I only wish I had bought one to begin with.

Yesterday the bed frame went back together and I hung the picture over it. Everything looks really nice, the bed pops and the forest picture doesn’t get lost in the background. Now what the heck am I going to do with that quart of light green?

Home Depot Shopping List

When ever we head out to Home Depot to buy several items I will create a “shopping” list with what aisle and bay the items are in, because I’m a guy and you know how men hate to ask directions. And even if I’d didn’t mind, sometimes it is hard to find a orange vest when you need one. The list is created inside the Home Depot app that I have on my phone.

The first time I tried this method I was foiled by my lack of a strong enough signal on my Moto G7 from Cricket. It wasn’t just because I was in a giant metal building either, the store must be in a AT&T dead zone because I couldn’t even pull up the app in the parking lot.

The next time I created a list I thought maybe I’d just print it out, but unfortunately the app doesn’t have this function. This might have been a good thing because as I considered doing this I flashed on the Progressive commercial where a group is in the airport and Dr. Rick asks to see their tickets and they all have them printed on paper.

So my only real solution is to write down everything I wanted with their respective aisle and bay number on a post-it and put it my pocket. This feels just a little like Garndparentamorphosis…

13.1 miles on an cold morning cannabis run.
Times Miata Driven since 01/01/22: 9

 

Don’t Forget Step 15

On Monday evening Donna called me into the kitchen to listen to the garbage disposal. It was making a strange noise and she thought that there might be something stuck in there. Cleaning out the disposal, like killing spiders, is man’s work, so I turned it on and it was making a very metallic noise, nothing like something stuck inside, but more like bad bearings.

Tuesday morning we headed off to Home Depot to buy a nice shiny new one. In the afternoon I swapped out the old Badger with the new Badger 100. Because I had swapped out a garbage disposal before back in Aiken I know how to do it, so it took about an hour and the hardest part was holding the unit up straight so I could lock it into place under the sink.

On Wednesday evening I was again summoned to the kitchen. Not garbage disposal this time, but dishwasher. The dishes were clean, but not rinsed and the the bottom of the dishwasher was full of water. Off to the internet to see what I might do about this. Looked at several pages of info and tried the easiest first, rerun the cycle and see if it drains. While it was running we tagged teamed the the dishes, I washed off the rinse agent and she dried and put away. Unfortunately the second cycle still left water in the bottom. Next and most obvious would be hose out connection to the garbage disposal, so I asked my wife if there was water in the bottom of the dishwasher after she washed on Tuesday and she said there wasn’t.

Every other solution I found I could check easily enough and dismiss or didn’t apply, leaving calling a repair person or buying a new dishwasher. You know, I don’t remember popping out the the dishwasher drain plug in the disposal, but Donna said there wasn’t any water in the bottom of the dishwasher after her first run on Tuesday. Did the disposal come with it already knocked out?

This morning, Thursday, I removed the dishwasher drain hose from the disposal and stuck my finger in the pipe and sure enough it was stopped dead. That is why the dishwater wouldn’t drain, it had no where to send the water except 6 feet down a plastic pipe where it got promptly turned around. Luckily there was enough room under the sink that I could get a screwdriver into the drain outlet pipe and whack it hard enough to get the plug out with out to much drama.

I forgot Step 15. I was lulled into a false sense of my own home repair acumen by having done the same job previously that I didn’t even read all the installation instructions, but I didn’t take into account the decrease of fine detail memory brought on by advancing age and the fact that I had done this job only once before a couple of decades ago.

Switching Switches

My latest home improvement project is changing out all the old style electrical toggle switches and putting in the more modern flat ones. All told there are 24 switches and switch plates in this plastic bag that is sitting on a shelf in the work shop area of the garage. Eighteen are single pole and 6 are of the 3-way variety.

Two of those 3-way switches, one upstairs by the front door and another downstairs in the garage, are a total mystery because they controlled nothing at all as far as we can tell. I hate to tell you just how many trips to Home Depot it took to complete this project, it seemed like a half dozen, but was probably less. The first time we went we bought a 10 pack of the flat switches, four 3-way switches (2 each for the garage light and the downstairs hallway and several varieties of switch plates. Of course I had miscounted (in my head) how many switches I needed. Not only was I unable to count straight, I was surprised by the mystery 3-way switch in the set of four by the front door.

Even with the help of my lovely bride and a tour of the house, when we got back from a second trip to HD we still missed a couple places that needed switches. Then after installing a remote controlled ceiling fan I needed a blanking plate because I removed the light switch entirely. This necessitated another trip to the big box home store. There may have been another trip in there somewhere too, I’m not sure So when I was surprised by the second mystery 3-way switch in the garage, that did nothing, I just put a single pole switch in its place (taping off the extra wire.)

Shoot, I Still Need A Chute

In Aiken, we used to be able to pile our yard waste at the curb and the city would come around with a truck armed with the Jaws of Death to remove it. In Klamath Falls, Waste Management takes care of the yard waste along with the trash and recyclables. But here you need to bag the waste and put it out on the curb with your plastic trash & recyclable bins. You get three 30 pound bags a week for free. The first few pickups we used some bio-degradable lawn bags, but when we ran out we bought some paper ones from Home Depot. They are kind of tall and hard to get to fully open. And once you do, they don’t stand still or stay open while loading them, but still nicer than the plastic bags.

A couple weeks back we noticed that our neighbor uses the same Home Depot bags too, but to go along with them she had this cool green plastic chute that fit perfectly inside the bag. It both held it open and standing up straight. It also made it easy to make sure the debris got into the bag…

I just had to have one of those. It was Sunday afternoon and we were in for the evening, so I figured we would just go to the store early on Monday and do Store Pickup. I checked for local availability and the web site said there were 43 of the Plastic Leaf and Lawn Chutes on hand. Since I was paying by charge card online and the chute is a mere $8.97 I thought maybe I should order something else to make it come to something over ten bucks at least. We were down to just one yard bag, so I added a 5-pack of the bags, of these they had over of thousand in stock, for a whopping $2.47 more.

I placed the order and my confirmation came within seconds. A few hours later I received another email from Home Depot, they were cancelling part of my order, the Leaf and Lawn Chute. I guess their inventory was off, way off. So now I had a charge on my credit card and a Store Pickup for two dollars and forty-seven cents.

When we finally made it to Home Depot on Tuesday morning, I almost pulled into the “Pandemic We’ll Bring It To Your Car” parking spot, but my not wanting to be not rude about it made me go ahead and enter the store. When I arrived at the the Customer Service Desk there were two representatives working and both were helping people. So I stood back my six socially distancing feet and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally someone came free and and helped me, but it seemed like it took so long it might have been quicker if I had walked back outside, moved the car, called the number and had them bring it to me.

I still need a chute, but I guess I can hold off until fall when maybe they actually will have some in stock (the web still says 43 on hand in Klamath Falls.)