Remodeling

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.

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.

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.

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.