It’s Always Darkest Before The Dawn

The Window

Mid-morning Donna called Lowe’s to see if thee was any update on finding our missing cabinets or expediting delivery of the reordered ones. The manager was not in yet, but she was transferred to our cabinet guy who told her he was called, at home, this morning at 8:00 AM and told a regional manager of the transportation company had located the missing cabinets and was personally driving them up from Charleston this morning.

A couple hours later we both got voice mails on our work phones to call the store back to arrange delivery. I ducked out of work at 2:00 PM and within a half hour a Lowe’s delivery truck arrived at the house. I had them put all three cabinets in the garage and unbox them. I just knew for sure with the way our luck was going that they would be the wrong color or style or damaged. They weren’t.

When I got back to work there was another message on my phone. This time from the counter top gal. Our piece of granite had arrived, could we come take a look at it and approve that it was what we expected. It was. We now have a tentative counter top install date of April 5th.

The last piece of the puzzle should arrive tomorrow and the clock starts ticking on the contractor. The counter top people want a 2 week head start on that to take the laser measurements, so he has to get everything in place by Friday the 22nd of March. It will be nice to see some movement on this project again.

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 Really Almost Out Of Texas Now

DFW

We decided that it would be a big treat to stay at a hotel right at the airport. I mean right at a terminal. We’ve done this before in Hartford/Springfield and it was cool to check out and then wheel your luggage right over to airline check-in.

The only one like that at Dallas/Ft. Worth is the Grand Hyatt and it is a step up from the one at Bradley International. A BIG step up. The cost is quite a bit more and, well, everything is a bit more. Donna and I are fighting out of our weight class on this one. Like most first class hotels you have to pay for internet, this place has 3 levels of internet, $10, $15 & $25 a night; speedy to blazing fast with a Netflix log-in. There is a refrigerator in the room, but it the hotel’s robotic mini bar, pull something out and it is scanned and added to your bill. This means we can’t put anything of our own in it for fear of being charged when we take it back out.

The 3 restaurants in the hotel were too nice for us to go in dressed in jeans and hiking boots, so we ordered room service. Soup and quesadilla for Donna and a grilled chicken caesar salad for me for the equivalent of a tank of gas for the Purple Whale. Tomorrow for breakfast we will be grabbing something in the terminal…maybe even from a DD.

But, we are in a room that is very spiffy, literally leaps and bounds above the usual HIE places we stay. All the switches are thin membrane and there is a control panel on each nightstand (which is really too plebeian a word for this piece of furniture) to control all the lights, the room temperature and the shades for the floor to ceiling window. The TV is a this year’s model 42″ Samsung. There is a tub or a glass walled shower to choose for your bathing needs. We both choose shower and it has one of those rain type heads that doesn’t have a water saver restrictor plate in it. Niiice. The king bed is awesome, I bet it is worth as much as Donna and I have spent on mattresses in our lifetime. And hey, no cheap shrink-wrapped plastic cups, we have real fine glassware to drink our ice water from. I could get used to this, if I could only afford it all the time.

Walking In The Desert

Grapevine Hills Trail

Beth was feeling a little under the weather, so she and baby Susan stayed in the room, while the rest of us went for a hike this morning. A 6 mile drive on paved roads leads to a 6 mile drive on a dirt road to the trail head of the Grapevine Hills Trail. Described in the brochure as a 1 mile one way easy trail following a sandy wash through massive granite-like boulders to a low pass and at the end is an optional 100 yard walk along a ridge to see a picturesque window of boulders.

In reality, the 1 mile part was right, but that 100 yard thing turned into a 1/4 mile hands and knees scramble up the side of the valley wall. The view from the top was worth it (see photo above), but the picturesque window of boulders was literally crawling with 8th graders, about 80 of them. They were there on a field trip that the students of a private school in Austin take every year to learn geology along with math and stuff.

After lunch we were going to drive a couple miles down the road and do part of the Lost Mine Trail to get a 2 mile hike. Everyone wanted to go this time and that meant taking two cars, which Donna and I really didn’t want to do. I looked through the trail book and found a 1.6 mile loop that started right here in the lodge parking lot. The first half or so was all uphill, gaining a couple hundred feet of elevation and at this point I think there were a couple wishing that they hadn’t come. The last part was all downhill and the group stayed pretty much together for that.

After dinner plans included a 1/2 mile walk downhill to see a ranger demonstration and then maybe a walk back up.

Tomorrow we have a dawn launch for the drive to Dallas where we’ll spend the night before flying home. Scott, Beth and the kids start their drive back to Washington State via Golden, NM and Steve heads up the road a couple hundred miles to home.

We Almost Out Of Texas

Rio Grande

This morning we all went for a couple of short walks near the lodge as we were marking time until Donna’s oldest brother Jim arrived. Jim was taking a day off from work in Dallas to come down and see everyone.

When he arrived we all piled into two cars and drove the 20 miles to the Rio Grande Village in the southeast part of the park. We had a picnic lunch and then took a short walk over to the boat ramp to actually stare off at another country, Mexico. Jim, myself, James and Madilyn tried to incite an international incident by throwing rocks at the other side. The river is only about 25 yards wide here and though several of our group landed rocks in the Mexican half of the river and I managed to strike land twice, no Federales returned fire.

While we were eating a roadrunner made a brief appearance near us, but accurately judging our maximum firing distance, or he was watching us throw stones at Mexico earlier, came no closer than 25 yards.

After our picnic we drove over to the Boquillas Canyon Overlook to gaze again at the Rio Grande and from this height some of its flood plain. At the parking area there were a half dozen or so large rocks covered in trinkets made from beads, pieces of Fool’s Gold and painted walking sticks in a sort of self-service Mexican souvenir stand. When we looked across the river, there were the artists and their horses sitting in the shade.

Prior to 9/11 there was an unofficial border crossing here. The Mexicans from the small isolated village of Boquillas, not too far from the overlook, would row American park visitors over to the other side to sell them these same type of items, before bringing them back across. Since then the crossing has been closed and Americans are not allowed to cross the border except via the official crossings a hundred miles east or west of here. I’m guessing there is a sort of understanding between the park rangers and the villagers that as long as they are not actually on American soil actively selling these items it is OK. And they let the Mexicans ride across the river in the morning to set up “shop” and then back to collect their unsold wares and proceeds each evening.