Renovations and Ranting

Chris and I have been working our tails off doing a lot of home improvement projects. We've done baseboards and door moldings, lots of painting, new vanity, counter, and toilet in the bathroom, and we've been working on the kitchen.

A couple months after we bought our condo at the end of 2005 we took our first pass at the kitchen. It had awful cabinets, we had no money, so we opted to paint them white. It took at least two weeks! And it was incredibly hard to do, much more difficult than you would think painting cabinets could be. But the end result was good enough for our attempt at slapping a bandaid on the whole situation.

Well, March 15th of this year we ordered new cabinets for the kitchen through Home Depot. It is now May 2nd, and we still haven't gotten all of them. We got a little more than half the order in three weeks after we placed it (1 week overdue already). But their special order people didn't even check that it was all there, a fact we discovered while taking inventory and loading the boxes of unassembled cabinets and doors into our cars. After a week of going to Home Depot daily -- "You know, you can call us instead of coming in" "Yeah, but no one answers the phone" -- they finally reordered the items and some that arrived damaged. Undetered, we went ahead with ripping out the current stuff and installing what we had. Three weeks later (and again, a week overdue) we got a couple more cabinets. Its been a couple weeks again and the last remaining items haven't come in. They'll tell me they're arriving that day, then that they were backordered. The latest is that the rest of the order will come in on May 7th (a Sunday?!).

Le sigh. I really don't like Home Depot. I just wish the Lowe's wasn't 30-45 minutes away. However, the new stuff does look lovely.