Rants

Here We Go Again (Part II)

Flag Stone Floor

The day after the tardy, sans writing utensil, carpet estimator showed up to measure the room, I received a call from Lowe?s, my estimate was ready. $445 and change.

Huh? Mentally doing some math in my head, carpet 144 sq/ft at $1.28 per plus 52 cents a sq/ft to install is around $250. With tax I should still be under $300. So I asked the girl on the other end could she break it down for me. There was 156 sq/ft of carpet (I asked for this so we could cover a little step going into the kitchen) so that is and additional twenty bucks. There was an additional $47 for the extra labor of covering said step. That seems a little high for amount of work, but that still leaves us in the middle $300 range. Then there was an additional 35 dollars for floor leveling compound and $45 for adhesive. I told her that my floor didn?t need leveling and she said she would have a Mr. Howard from the installation company call me.

So Donna and I started whittling away at some of the costs to get the price down to a manageable level. Forget the extra foot of carpet, I’ll just paint the step. No leveling and a favorably installation date & time and we would go for it. And WTF, the installation cost didn?t already include the glue? For the 52 cents a sq/ft they were basically trimming 5? off two sides and laying it down in the room? I?m betting the installation cost you see advertised in the store for wall to wall carpet doesn?t include the tack strips either.

Mr. Howard never called me, but the Lowe’s girl left a message on my work phone the next day to the effect that she had spoken to him and he said if the floor wasn?t leveled we ran the risk of seeing or feeling the joints in between the flag stones of the existing floor through the carpet.

Because I never got to speak to Mr. Howard I never got to explain to him that it is not real flagstone, it is some sort of hard vinyl outdoor flooring from the fifties that is a fairly convincing simulation. There is a difference in height between the ?stone? and the ?grout?, but it is measured in thousandths of an inch and in no way would be felt through even the thinnest carpet applied over it. And had the mental midget who measured, looked down at something besides his tape measure, he would have noticed the swirly glue residue left behind from when we had pulled up the previous carpet and maybe realized that the floor didn?t need leveling.

So what now? We are into Lowe’s for $51 for the measurement visit, but thirty-five of which we would get off the install charge if they did it. The other $16 was for an asbestos check that was spent on our estimation guy using his Jedi mind powers to look for this problematic material. Either that or he can smell it because we didn’t see him do anything except unfurl his tape measure twice.

So we did the smart thing, cut our loses with Lowe’s, found some commercial carpet we liked at Home Depot for 85¢ a sq/ft, bought a tub of glue and some fresh blades for my box cutter. Total cost, is under $200 because my labor is free and that even includes the $51 we threw away.

(coming soon: Home Depot carpet buying experience & Lowe’s Ship to Store fun)

Here We Go Again

We decided that it was time to update the carpet in the “computer room.” It was put down at the same time that the carpet in the kitchen was, probably 15 years ago. It had two circular spots matted down in two of the four corners from the computer chair sitting on it for long periods of time. A couple years back we broke down and bought a chair mat, not so much to protect the carpet, it was too late for that, but to hide the most worn spot.

At first I was going to do it, then we thought maybe kitchen contractor guy would do it, but in the end a Lowe’s sub contractor will be doing it. They want just 50¢ a square foot, which in our case amounts to less than $75. Cheap enough.

They charge $35 to come out measure the room or in our case $50 because our house was built before 1978 and they need to check for asbestos. That cost will come off the installation charge as long as you do get them to install the carpet. We hope this guy is better at measuring than the last guy.

We scheduled an appointment for measurement today and was given a time range of 3:00 PM to 4:00 PM. We went into work a half hour early for three days, so we could make up the 1-1/2 hour off we left the plant today to make it home in time for our appointment. Three o’clock. 3:15, 3:30, quarter to four, 4:00 PM, nobody shows. Ten after four Donna starts calling numbers to find out where the measuring guy is. At 4:13 a red pickup pulls in our driveway.

He comes in and apologizes profusely for being late. Two quick measurements and he’s done. Pulls out his pad and starts patting his pockets. “Could I borrow a pen?” he asks. Sure you can, Donna hands him a pencil and I roll my eyes.

At least he didn’t leave a mess…

Paisano Pete

Paisano Pete

The final cabinet (the 24″ Drawer Base replacement) arrived Wednesday afternoon. Donna pulled the duty of coming home and waiting for this piece seeing as I had done it on Tuesday for the 3 wandering cabinets. Those showed up in a Lowe’s branded truck handled by Lowe’s employees in Lowe’s red vests.

This single piece, like the major portion of the order before it, arrived in the back of a Budget Rental truck manned by folks in jeans and tees. At least the first bunch found the house fine. For this guy I had to talk him in like a stewardess landing a jumbo jet after the pilot has had a heart attack. Even with me guiding him he still made a wrong turn and 5 minutes later after not seeing my next landmark had to make a u-turn.

We were supposed to be stop 5 according to the dispatcher, but this guy must have skipped #4 because Donna said that he had to climb over a bunch of boxes to get to our one item. He then nearly dropped it while moving it around in the truck. But eventually the cabinet made it in to our garage and in spite of all my imagined scenarios of what could have been wrong with it, it was fine.

Donna then had to call his next delivery appointment (possibly #4) and find out where she was, so Donna could direct the truck driver. He claimed his GPS was broken, but judging by appearances we think that maybe he just didn’t know how to operate one.

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.