Damn Them!

 Damn them! Way back in 1983 UDC was building a new townhouse development. They wanted it to look nice, but they really wanted to suck in some profits so they looked to cut corners at every turn. The walls they didn't properly fill with insulation damn them.

They didn't bother with expensive factory built roofing trusses oh no, they allowed their uneducated construction teams build the roofs on site without blueprints, as a result no two roofs in this community were exactly alike, damn them.

Instead of using the modern dual pane windows throughout their new community they decided that they could increase the profit margin if they went with out of date single pane jobs that were then installed improperly so that opening them was a chore if it was even possible at all, damn them.

Instead of using industry standard width door openings, they got a deal on some non-standard doors and mounted those inside all of their new homes, thus insuring headaches for any future home owner that may wish to replace them further down the road, damn them.

Instead of carefully mounting the bathroom mirrors to the wall with Mastic the way every contractor on the planet seems to they chose to place two small plastic clips screwed into the drywall boards and two small metal base plates about an inch and a half long also screwed into the drywall to support large plate glass mirrors that in one case was nearly nine feet long! This was quarter inch thick plate glass three feet wide, it weighed nearly a hundred pounds and it fell off the wall into our hands. Damn them.

Instead of buying proper cabinetry for the kitchen pantry and the hall linen storage they chose to mount cheap particle board shelves directly to the walls using about a thousand foot long nails and covering them up with nice matching cabinet facings, damn them.

And just to add insult to injury the City of Tempe will be coming by to pick up bulk trash this week including all of the boards from these worthless cupboards, they only have one rule; there cannot be ANY nails in the wood! DAMN THEM! So it's a de-nailing I must go to rid the world, or at least my tiny corner of it, of ancient nails shot into boards nearly forty years ago by over-eager teenage wanna-be carpenters with their rapid-fire toy nail guns! Damn Them!

Murphy's Law

 Of course! No sooner do I shorten the wait time for our cabinets by weeks then our contractor calls and tells me the very best news possible.

Seems his long time partner, a guy he relies on to be able to finish his work on time and on budget can no longer work. Seems he is too high mileage, heart problems, arthritis, like that.

What does that mean you ask? A delay in the start time of our project. The original start date was 8 May. Then we were told two extra weeks while they finished their current project. Now, that two weeks has extended to the beginning of July. Which does guess what? Extends the completion date out into October.

Just shoot me now.

We are exploring options, I get to spend the early part of next week on the phone. Wee.

Customer Service

 I have to say that expecting companies in the current environment to be concerned with what an individual customer needs or wants is optimistic in the extreme. Especially when construction and contractor business can really pick and choose their customers right now. But on Monday our cabinet supplier sent me a text message announcing that we should expect delivery in between 15 to 16 weeks.

WHAT?!?! I was gobsmacked to say the very least. We had been told to expect 8 to 10 weeks but probably 8, to suddenly be told that it would now be twice that long, I can only say that I was upset. This would put our completion date sometime in early October! No, that can't be right can it? But with a cabinet delivery date of August 16 you need to add a week for the install to take place, (It will actually only take a couple of days to install but it is the lead time that kills you here.), then another 3 to 5 weeks for countertops plus a week to allow for plumbing, (again the lead time is the killer) yada yada yada...

I sat staring at the calendar in disgust, wanting to be able to scream at some one and completely unable to. Sigh.

Today I took matters into my own hands and instead of calling the third party we bought the cabinets from I called the cabinet supplier directly. (You would think I would have learned by this point in my life but, no.)

After being tossed from one nameless drone to another I landed in the Logistics Department. OK. The lad I spoke with was very calm and understanding but explained again about Covid disruptions to supply chains and so forth and we chatted about how this was going to destroy my schedule and so on. He was sympathetic, he understood, and he saw a way around the problem. With a few minutes of rearranging of schedules at his end he was able to change our delivery date from August 16 to July 9! Now THAT is what I call customer service!

That's 5 full weeks just so you know.

It still means that we won't be complete until deep into August or early September but 5 weeks is 5 weeks and I will gleefully accept it!