Kitchen

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.

Day Fourteen

Day Fourteen

Not much is happening as we are in limbo because of the cabinet reshuffle. While we wait on our 3 new and 1 replacement unit little things are going on. Today there was some sheet rock mudding going on and a light switch was moved.

The moving of this switch is small potatoes in the grand scheme of the kitchen remodel, but it will be a big deal for Donna and I. The switch controlled the overhead light in the “computer room” which is between the kitchen and garage. Because at one point, before we lived there, the garage was a carport and the computer room was a screened porch, the switch was inside the house, in the kitchen not outside in the screened porch. Now it will be on the other side of the wall, so for the next couple of months we will probably slap the smooth wall in the kitchen as we walk into the computer room before remembering it has been relocated.

130,000 Bad Thoughts

After looking at what we had and where we could go with our (bigger than the cabinet guy thought) kitchen this morning, Donna and I devised a plan that we thought was great. We took the 15″ wastebasket base cabinet that we were going to return and put it on the wall where we had 15″ more room. As a bonus it was a perfect fit to cover up the awkward heating vent to the adjacent room that couldn’t be moved and it placed the trash can in a sweet spot between the sink and the dishwasher. To make the top cabinets match we would then need to buy an additional 15″ wall unit. On the stove side we would take down the 12″ inch cabinet off the wall, return it, along with the 12″ base cabinet and replace them with 21″ cabinets to fill up nearly all of the “extra” 12 inches on the that wall.

The contractor arrived and pitched his idea, buy 4 new 12″ cabinets and add them to the ends on both walls of what we now had. This would work to his best advantage as he could finish installing what we had on hand and then add the new stuff when it showed up. We shot him down for a couple reasons, the main one was something that Donna has been against from the git go, she didn’t want anything to the left of the stove, between it and the door. The cabinet guy originally wanted to put a 9″ thing there and now here was the contractor proposing something 12 inches wide there. Another one is that we didn’t want any more 12″ cabinets or any at all now that we’ve seen one and realized there isn’t much you can put it in one of them.

After the confab with our contractor we went over to Lowe’s in North Augusta and chatted with our cabinet guy. He was apologetic and we kept it civil. He ordered up the 3 new needed cabinets and also ordered a no cost replacement for one of the ones we received where the doors didn’t look straight and wouldn’t close completely. He is going to expedite them, so hopefully we will get them in a week to 10 days instead of the 4 weeks the original order took. Now because of the configuration changes we will get to return some of the already ordered stuff and that will cover about 60% of the cost of the three new cabinets, so it is not a staggering expenditure.

The contractor and some friends thought that we shouldn’t have to pay any more money to make things right, but Donna and I are more pragmatic than that. Sure cabinet guy mis-measured, but the contractor himself should have caught it if he had actually measured instead of just eyeballing the cabinet guy’s print outs and signing off on them. Heck, I should have noticed the difference myself because I had measured the kitchen when I drew up plans for the granite people to use to quote the counter tops with. We figured had the cabinet guy measured right, or someone noticed the difference in the lengths somewhere along the line, we would have been spending that much more on the right sized cabinets anyway. The only real harm done is we will be without a kitchen for a couple weeks longer which when all is said and done will seem like nothing.

Almost about the time we got back home from North Augusta the Emperor hit the 130,000 mile mark.

Started up, went down, back up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 1201

Day Nine

Day Nine

A little bit of sheet rock, a tangled mess of wires and still no grout on the floor and they were here until around 7:00 PM tonight. Looks like to me they still have at least another day to button this up. I don’t see how they can start hanging cabinets tomorrow.

Cabinet Day

C Day

Our cabinets were scheduled to arrive between 1 and 5:00 PM today, so Donna and I took the afternoon off so that we could be here when they arrived. We thought, that like the dishwasher when it was delivered, we would get a half hour final call to let us know they were on the way. We left work at 11:30, parked at our bank and turned on the cell phone. We went inside and cashed a check, then walked the 4 blocks to Betsy’s on the Corner for lunch. On our way back to the car we made a quick stop at the new candy store in downtown.

It was now a little after one, so we headed home to change clothes and do some running around in LA (Lower Aiken. AKA the south side of town.) When we got to our street there were no trucks in front of our house. Uh, oh. Did our contractor have another reason not to show up for the third day in a row. We were pleasantly surprised to find the kitchen in shambles as he had been here and was knee deep in the wiring process. Must be at lunch. Off to Lowe’s we go. We are eyeballing wallpaper and borders for the dining room and curtains for the living room and dining room. Hey, got to spend the big gift card on something.

After Lowe’s we were going to go to the library to kill some more time and await the call, but seeing as home was sort of on the way, decided to drive by and see if there were any trucks in front of the house now. As we headed up the street before you turn onto our street we ended up behind a big Budget Rental truck. Both Donna and I simultaneously said to each other, “I wonder if those are our cabinets?” Sure enough the truck turned onto our street and started slowly creeping its way along with its flashers on. We hung the first left and drove the circle around the back way and came out in front of our house as the truck was slowly pulling to a stop there too.

Never did get that final warning call.

So Much For A New Top

With all the back and forth of cabinet choices (location, specifications, color, etc.) we didn’t get around to ordering them until the 18th of January. This turned out to be a good thing as Lowes, along with the $1300 discount we got, added a promotion on the 17th that gave you a gift card for 10% of your total cabinet order. Of course it was for 10% off after they took the $1300 off, but I was taught never to look a gift horse in the mouth.

We asked the cabinet guy if it was a Lowes gift card and he said, “No, it’s a Visa gift card. You can use it anywhere.” Cool, we thought, that’ll cover the cost of a new convertible top for the Emperor. The top has got a few major blemishes, a few minor blemishes and a few minor places where the top layer of fabric has worn down to the lining. No leaks yet, but…

Got two envelopes in the mail today with the word Lowes on the top line of the return address. One was to let us know we were pre-approved for a Lowes Visa credit card and the other was a gift card for 10% of our cabinet purchase – on a Lowes gift card.

Trying hard not to stare at the equine periodontia.