Rants

Kitchen Remodel From Hell

The cabinets that we were waiting for – the delivery company lost them. I wanted a dedicated line for the dishwasher and one for the refrigerator and the contractor said he’d need to sub out an electrician to do that. In our contract there was a decent chunk of change for electrical, but he was assuming that he could do it all. I offered him up to $400 to have the additional dedicated line put in. He sent and email today:

The two electrical circuits are being installed at 9 am in the morning. The total to add a dedicated refrigerator and dedicated dishwasher line is $650. Let me know if that’s ok.

I replied:
So we’re paying $400 and the other $250 is yours right?

Donna got on the warpath this afternoon and started with the cabinet people who once again said they would try and trace our elusive 3 cabinets. Unhappy with that, she started on the other end and talked to a manger at the NA Lowe’s. After reading him the riot act, he said he would check and see what he could find out. After an hour she called him back, he didn’t have an answer yet, give him another half hour. He called her before the time expired. He got the delivery company to admit that they LOST the cabinets. And being proactive, or trying desperately to cover their butts, the delivery company ordered replacements from Shenandoah, without telling Lowe’s. The manager was happy to report our cabinets would ship from the factory on the 13th.

So she questioned him to the fact that that meant we wouldn’t see the cabinets until a week later on the 20th. And when he hesitated, she told him that was unsatisfactory and if he couldn’t have a truck with those cabinets at our house by the 15th, he should bring the truck anyway so he can come get his cabinets and refund our money.

He said he’d call her back. He hasn’t yet. But still install the electrical because we are going to be sticking with the locations of stuff either way this shakes out.

His reply:

If you want me to pay the other $250 that’s fine. I know it was an unexpected cost. The lines are actually $275 each with $100 for wire and breakers. I’m concerned and wondering if there will ever be cabinets and the only scary part is that I have other jobs coming that are overlapping. I’m also going to Florida for a week at the beginning of April. I know y’all are frustrated with this whole process.

My response:
Every little setback chips away at our attitude. Minor little things now seem magnified, like why was the hammer out of my meager tool box used? And that would have been fine, but couldn’t it have been put away. It was OK that you laid out all the trim pieces to ensure you had it all, but could you have stacked them to one side so access to that bathroom didn’t involve tip toeing around things? We said help yourself to the sodas, but have the decency to either finish it or throw the unfinished can/bottle in the dumpster. Trust me, we got a lot of these…

Frustration. A lot of it stems from the lack of progress. We’ve paid you 2/3 of your price and it seems like we’ve gotten 1/3 of the work done. We understand that there is a process to these things and you want to get all the cabinets here before you put everything together, but it seems to us in our non-construction eyes that is a lot of stuff that could be going on while we wait for our three wayward cabinets to show. Is there any reason that the the three base cabinets on the front wall can’t be locked down along with that 15″ base unit? Plumbing for the dishwasher? Once the electrical is put in is there any reason that the back wall can’t be finished off, framing of the over the refrigerator and right side cabinets?

You too must be frustrated, but we are all in this too deep to back out now. Thanks for letting me vent here, I feel marginally better, the jury is still out on Donna though. I do know this, if either of us hears one more person say, “One day you’ll look back at this and laugh,” your brother may be involved in the investigation of the consequences. 🙂

I’m thinking that maybe I should pay a visit tomorrow morning to see if he is here and talk face to face. Sometimes email communications get misinterpreted because there is no way of perceiving infliction from the Courier New font.

Day Eighteen, Nineteen & Twenty

Day Sixteen

Tuesday the additional 3 cabinets were supposed to arrive at Lowe’s in North Augusta. Wednesday the contractor made the trip over to pick up the cabinets. They were not there. The cabinet people confirmed they shipped them to the delivery people and there the trail goes cold. Nice job, Air Traffic Services of Charleston.

So needless to say, nothing new happened as far as installation went. To kill some time while waiting on the missing cabinets, the contractor decided to break out all the pieces of trim and make sure he had everything he needed. The crown molding for the cabinets is a single straight board to the ceiling at a 45 degree angle. The inventory list said there should be five 8′ pieces, but we have 4 of them and one 8′ piece of cove shaped molding. Nice job Shenandoah Cabinet people.

Oh, if you wanted to come into our house and take our TV, computer, the fine Chinet or anything for that matter, while we were gone on vacation you could have. And it wouldn’t even have been breaking and entering. Some one from our crack kitchen remodeling team left the key to our front door in the driveway. I discovered it laying there while moving the 2 x 4s out from under the Purple Whale’s awning, so I could park there when we got back.

We Still In Texas

TexasToday was an awesome day, but nearly any day would be that way compared to yesterday. After arriving at DFW a half an hour early, things went downhill in a hurry. The 35 mile drive from rental car center to our hotel was awful. Driving around any big city is always fraught with peril, but this was worse than the I-285 loop around Atlanta. The intersection of TX360 and I-20 in Arlington was 2 lanes merging into two more followed by two more which was immediately followed up with an exit to a giant shopping area. Three miles of creeping and trying not to get crushed by big bully pickup trucks. 15 miles of 4 to 5 lanes of crazy Texas drivers. Later we got to our exit to find it under construction and closed. No, wait a minute, it pops up behind a bunch of orange reflective signs. Two left turns after sitting in two long traffic lights we pull into the HIE parking lot.

It is now 7:00PM (our body time) and we have had nothing to eat besides some apple slices since Chick-Fil-A at noon. Our blood sugar is low, we are frazzled with the traffic and short on patience for each other, let alone a prospective guest at the hotel who is trying to check in without a reservation or a credit card. We decide to eat first and check-in afterwards. The reason we picked this particular hotel because it is right across the street from a Razzoo’s, my favorite restaurant in the whole world. After risking life and limb crossing the busy street to get there, we find that a lot of other people think it is their favorite too. The wait is 25 minutes. Back across the busy street is a strip shopping mall with a couple of likely places to eat. The first was a pizza place, but when we get to the door it has changed into a tofu and lawn clippings place. A few doors down is a Jimmie John’s sub place. Now we are sinking to a hunger place where something that might have been marginally acceptable before no longer sounds even appetizing.

Hey, there was a steak joint just down the street from the hotel, let’s go there. As we get closer to the place it starts appearing like this is not going to work at all, the parking lot is jammed and there are cars parked in the dirt field next to it. I volunteer to go inside and see how long the wait is. We agree on 15 minutes max. As I weave my way towards the door through the throng of people, I can see inside and see it would take a couple of NFL linemen to clear a path to the hostess station, I find a gap and retreat. There is an IHOP with a mostly empty parking across the street. We head over there, admitting defeat and accepting that dinner will probably suck. We were not disappointed.

We had asked for a top floor room and away from the elevator. Our requests were granted and we are assigned Room 427. We drag all our bags inside and start to make ourselves at home. Donna starts unpacking and I fire up the laptop to check the WiFi. Everything is peachy until I turn on the TV. The picture is all snowy on the movie menu page, and when I exit to get to the regular channels the screen goes black. I shut off the TV and turn it back on. The menu screen is better this time, but a black screen shows up for the regular channels again. I go back down, tell the clerk my problem and ask for another room close by so we don’t have to move our stuff too far. He gives me a key to Room 428. The first thing I do upon entering is hit the power button on the remote…nothing happens. Figuring it might be dead batteries in the remote I find the power button on the TV itself. Pressing it has no effect. Back downstairs I go. I tell the clerk, “Very funny. That TV doesn’t even turn on.” “I’ll give you one more shot, if the next room has a non working TV I want me money back.” This time he comes with me up the elevator and we try the TV in Room 426. It works. The clerk goes back to his desk and we I gather our stuff and cross the hall to our new room. Third times a charm…

So today was spent basking in low traffic back roads where between towns the speed limit is 70 MPH. We found 8 or 9 interesting caches while exploring a few small Texas frontier towns. Tomorrow we are planning on geocaching in San Angelo State Park before a short drive to Fort Stockton to spend Monday night.

Day Sixteen

Day Sixteen

Another not much done day. And Day 17 won’t happen until this coming Wednesday when the contractor goes over to North Augusta to get 3 of the 4 cabinets we are short. ETA on the final piece of the puzzle isn’t until a week later on the 13th. If the counter top takes a couple weeks we won’t have a kitchen for at least another month.

Day Fifteen

Day Fifteen
(wire for under cabinet light)

The two contractor guys only stayed at the house for about 3 hours today and worked some more on covering seams in sheet rock and sealing up gaps in the wall in preparation for cabinet installation, whenever that might be.

The first hour of their time was spent helping me schlep the not needed cabinets and trim pieces back to Lowe’s so I could get the refund money. They carried the big 24″ square base cabinet and the two pieces of 96″ long trim for the side of the refrigerator in their pickup truck. I put the 2 small cabinets and a dishwasher return in the trunk and then back seat of the Purple Whale. Upon arrival we piled all the items in the corner of the returns area and they went back to the house, while I got in line behind the one person needing assistance besides me.

The receipt I had was for the entire 78 item cabinet order with descriptions of each item that were sometimes long and always cryptic. The item numbers were also listed and because we had gotten the $1300 discount back when we ordered them, there was the list price, the prorated discount price, and the final price on there too. The piece of paper was over 4? long. Oh, and by the way, it was slightly incomplete as the cash register had run out of tape as it printed it. The very first step in the refund process is to scan the bar code on the bottom of the receipt to call up the invoice number, oops, that didn’t get printed because of the short paper.

She looked the order up using my phone number and we commenced to searching our respective lists, my long receipt and her on her computer screen. This process was particularly vexing as my receipt was not printed in any kind of order. For her it was difficult because she was looking at a 40 row high by 80 column wide CRT with item number and description in one narrow column that truncated it after about 10 characters. I would find my item and call out the item number and its description and she would page down, page down, page down until she found something that might be my item. After about 20 minutes she had five items for refund and printed out the receipt for me to sign. When I looked at it, it had 5 items, but one was a repeat, but inexplicably it had a separate price of 1 cent. So now I had to compare those 4 items to those listed on my 4? long receipt to find the missing fifth item. I did find it and good thing too, as it was $120 for one of those 96? panels.

We still weren’t done. I had the 24?drawer base that I needed to return to the store so they could order the replacement. The girl helping me out didn’t know how to handle it, so she tried calling someone from the cabinet department to get an explanation, but no one answered. No one answered her page either, so she called someone in the office upstairs and she was told to do a refund and have me buy the cabinet again. Of course as soon as she hit the enter key to refund my charge card, someone from cabinets showed up and said, that isn’t how it is handled, it was supposed to be handled internally. So she then had to call a manger over to override the refund internally at the store level, but it was too late for Visa, so I had to buy back my broken cabinet only to leave it behind while they contacted the manufacturer for a new one.

By time I was finished there were about a dozen, probably internally fuming, people in line waiting to return something.

Best Buy Survey

As part of the remodeling I purchased an item online from Best Buy. I was informed that I would get a phone call the day before, sometime before 8:00 PM, to give me a 2 hour window for my delivery. They called at 7:45 PM. An omen perhaps?

The truck pulled up with 5 minutes left in the widow and the folks delivering the item were courteous and swift with getting my stuff in the house. Because there weren’t installing anything they were done and gone even before the 5 minutes left in the delivery window expired. This morning I got an email asking me to take a survey on my experience. They dangled the usual entery in a sweepstakes drawing as enticement to complete it, but I was going to do it anyway. It was only about 8 or 9 questions long and the largest time portion was spent writting the comments on the end:

They arrived at 2:55 PM, with just 5 minutes to spare in the 1:00 PM -3:00 PM delivery window I was given on the phone. The driver called 2 hours before to see if I was at home because he was passing thru on his way to another town and wanted to know if he could make the delivery then. I was at work, but he couldn’t wait the 15 minutes it would take me to get home, so he continued on.

The manifest they left behind with my purchase had a delivery time frame on it of 10:30 to 12:30 and an estimated Time of 11:19 AM – 11:34 AM (right around when he called.) If someone had called me earlier with the manifest time frame for delivery I could have received my item in the morning.

Your survey also needs some work and I would have rated it as completely unsatifactory if you aksed me about it. You cannot skip over the items on it that are not applicable, so I rated your delivery service as completely unsatisfactory in “Product Knowledge” and “In Store Experience” because it was an online purchase and all they had to do was put the box in my home.

We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Antenna

Our Leaf antenna manages to outperform the cheapo rabbit ears. The signal is somewhat better and we now get the SCETV’s 3 channels, but FOX channel 54 and it’s secondary channel are no better. When it is cloudy and windy, all except for the NBC stations channel can get pixelated. So I ordered a pre-amplifier.

It arrived Friday and when I came home from work the first thing I did was hook it up. Wow, waste of 20 bucks. Maybe it helps on some channels, but it didn’t improve the one channel, UHF 54, that we really needed the help with. Sigh. How much is my time and hassle worth to ship this item back?

What is really odd that the folks at TV Fool.com say I should have no issue with channel 54…

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1187