Back in March, I posted that Cabinet Guy had allegedly ordered my doors. They apparently arrived in May sometime. I didn’t announce that here because, hey, what else is new. I told him to give the doors to Contractor Sal and never heard from him.
Then, yesterday, CG emails saying “I have had these doors for a while. When can I send Cabinet Assistant to install them”. I replied that I wanted Contractor Sal to do it, as I had told him in May. CG said that Contractor Sal was not qualified to do it (??!?!?!) and instead of arguing, I said fine.
I must give you text to understand what happened next:
My email: “Fine. Please give me a window when he will be here. I will not be
available in the late afternoon.”
CG’s response (read this carefully for future reference): “I can work around your schedule. I can send him there in the morning”
Do you read that as telling me that he will come here in the morning? I did. Yet the morning passed with no Assistant. I emailed at noon. And at 2. And at 4. Finally around 5pm, CG replies with this gem:
Jen,
You did not confirm with me that this morning was going to work for you. I checked my email throughout the morning times and had no email from you. I said on my last email that I can work around your schedule and that I can send him in the morning. But needed a confirmation from you
I m sorry for any misunderstanding.
Cabinet Guy
Well, dear readers, I lost it. I was angry at being stood up and when I saw this nonsense I started literally shaking because I was so mad. I gave myself a few minutes to try to calm down. I didn’t calm down. Instead, I sent this email and left a voicemail (since he wouldn’t take my calls) with identical content:
Cabinet Guy-
Are you serious? You said you would send him in the morning. What was
there to confirm about that? You did not ask for a confirmation, did
not ask for a time slot. I cannot believe you are trying to pull an
excuse like this over on me. The levels of unprofessionalism you have
repeatedly subjected me to in this process are mind boggling.
I am left with very few options here. It has been 2 and a half YEARS
that I have been trying to get this resolved with you. Let me make
things very clear. I want the doors delivered to Sal on Monday. I
don’t care where he is, where you have to go, or what else you are
doing. He is perfectly capable of installing them (despite your claims
to the contrary) and, frankly, has done much better work than the
hacking you did when you came here before. Do not try to come to my
house, do not try to send someone to my house. Deliver them to Sal. I
have cced Sal on this message with our correspondence below so he is
aware of the situation.
If I do not hear that doors are delivered on Monday, I will be
contacting my lawyer and I can assure you that I will make sure this
mess costs you more in legal fees than you got from me for the
cabinets in the first place. I have left you a voice mail with these
same details.
-Jen
Magically, he called back 15 minutes later. And get this. First, he said that he never said he WOULD send the guy this morning. He said “I wrote and said I CAN send the guy. C-A-N can.” Yep, he spelled at me. He insisted that it was 100% my fault that the guy didn’t come. If he were here, I’m pretty sure I would have punched him.
Then he goes on to tell me that none of this was his fault. He said it was MY fault because I wanted doors that the manufacturer had to make. He said it was my fault for waiting so long to hear from him. He said he took no responsibility for any of the problems. He had no interest in responding to my assertion that 2.5 years was not a reasonable time for this to take.
I repeated my next step - doors by Monday or lawyer. He said “I don’t want to go down that route with you, Jen.” And I said “You won’t have a choice, Cabinet Guy. You will get served and you will have to respond.”
And 15 minutes after that, the doors were sitting outside my door. That’s right. I have the doors. They are the right size (Contractor Sal measured for them). They are the right color. They are the right pattern. They are sitting in front of their future home on my cabinet.
The Saga of Cabinet Guy appears to be over. All it took was a serious threat of legal action.
Let’s think of what has happened since I started my kitchen renovation, which has been held up only by cabinet guy.
Bush was still President and Rod Blajojevich was serving as Governor of Illinois
The country met Sarah Palin
…actually, that’s already pretty depressing, so I’m going to stop there.
Let’s think about what this means in the bigger picture. Cabinet Guy has finally delivered. It’s pretty close to hell freezing over. Up next…a Cubs World Series win?????
Well, for now, I will just enjoy this victory and the idea that perhaps my kitchen will be finished before I have to replace the next appliance.
Remember that I was talking to Cabinet Guy back in February and he said he would get my doors ordered right away? Well today I woke up to an email from him:
Good morning jen,
They have to be custom made and finished. Please allow 8-10 weeks
Thank you
My guess is that this is 8-10 weeks from today, not from when he said they would be finished a month ago. Furthermore, I’m not sure why it takes 8-10 weeks to make a pair of doors, but such are the mysteries of cabinet guy.
This timeline puts delivery at the beginning of June. At that point, we will officially be over 2 years since the beginning of the kitchen project. That’s normal, right? Renovating an 8′X10′ kitchen would obviously take that long…
When Cabinet Guy was here last time, he lost a piece of cabinet trim. I had three pieces all in the “someday the kitchen will be finished” drawer. When he left, there were only two. He, of course, said he had no idea about the trim.
As I was insulating the dishwasher, I found this missing piece shoved in the back of my cookie sheet cabinet. I’m sure they moved it and just tossed it in somewhere.
With this piece found, I was able to finish putting up the trim that has gone undone since May 2008. It makes a surprisingly big difference. Now the only two things left to do are to fix the end panels that Cabinet Guy messed up (Contractor Sal will do this during his next visit) and to get the right freaking doors. I’m still trying to make Cabinet Guy understand me on that one.
Cabinet Guy responded today. Here’s what he said:
there is a strip that goes on one of the doors to hide the gap. Those are the correct doors for that cabinets. I said if you find it necessary to get new Qdoors[sic] that I will do my best to work with the manufacture to make custom doors if all possible. Sal was going to install a strip between the doors that would have resolved this problem.
The thing is, he told me to put this strip in before and I said “No, get me some damned doors without a gap between them.” Contractor Sal took measurements for this and those are the measurements he gave to Cabinet Guy last spring. I informed Cabinet Guy of this, but it looks like we’re back where we were in January 2009.
Contractor Sal won’t be able to save me, either. He broke his foot and is out for 2 months. Perhaps we should take bets on whether or not I’ll have the doors by August.
After chatting with MOM, I’m more convinced about the tile. I think I’ll do the blue tiles on the wall…
And then do a white tile on the floor like this:
I like the shiny white floor and I think it would go very well with the glass tile on the wall. I had thought about glass on the floor but I think it would be too much. This picture really convinced me. It’s an interesting bath, but I don’t really like the colored floor and with the blue walls I think it would be overwhelming.
So that’s the plan for now. Blue walls, shiny white floor. Then we’ll have white sink/toilet/bath, white walls above the tile, and white cabinets. I’ll still be looking for other tiles just in case I find something that I might like better.
I’m tentatively moving forward with initial plans for my possible spring bathroom renovation.
I’m thinking specifically about tiles. About a year ago I was watching one of those house selling shows on TLC or HGTV or something, and the couple featured had redone their bathroom floor and walls in this amazing purple-blue 1″ glass tile combination. I loved it and wanted their exact bathroom. However, I have no pictures of it to even share the idea. I also think doing something that bold wouldn’t be good if I ever decide to sell this house (don’t worry house - I love you and have no plans to sell you).
However, I think the glass tiles would be really great. I’m debating two things. First, do I do the floor and walls all the same OR do I put the glass tiles on the wall and do something different on the floor? I’m also considering color. I like color. Blue is particularly attractive. I can totally see my bathroom floor and walls in this tile:
But I also see the benefits of something more neutral. This iridescent white is interesting, but I think I’d get over it pretty quickly.
However, I don’t want to do just plain white tiles. Thus, I’m still looking around.
I am also considering how much of the walls to tile. Right now, they are tiled up to about 4 feet. I’d do the shower enclosure all the way to the ceiling. The bathroom is tiny so I could do the whole room up to the ceiling. However, that might feel too much like a weird tiled chamber so I’m leaning toward keeping the rest of the room at the current height. The rest of the walls would be white.
Do you think a blue bathroom in that first tile would be too bold? I know I would love it, and that’s probably enough to convince me despite what anyone says, but I’d be more encouraged if other house people wouldn’t be scared away by a bathroom in that tile.
When I was in Chicago, my mom and I ran the Rock ‘n’ Roll Half Marathon. Since it starts bloody early (6:30am), we stayed downtown at the Hard Rock Hotel. I’m a big fan of this place. When I was unpacking today, I found my keycard.
Nothing special on front (though a $25 gift card is pretty cool). However, I found this on the back:
It’s made of bioPVC which allegedly bio-degrades in 18 months to 5 years. Do you believe it? I figured we should try it out.
Card, meet composter.
Using plastic line bought for an old trimmer, one end goes through a hole I drilled in the card, and one end gets tied to the top of the composter.
Next summer, we’ll pull it out and see how it’s looking.
For those of you who had not previously noticed, I am a scientist. These are the types of things I do for fun.
I finally broke down and bought the SolarCone composter I posted about a few weeks ago. I produce very little trash in my house, and almost all of it is recyclable. I probably need to take the trash out every 6 weeks. Still, I do have veggies go wilty pretty often, and I have all kinds of stems and such. Most of that I’d freeze in my freezer drawer until trash day and then send it off to the dump. For most people, compostable material is a huge percentage of the trash they sent to landfills. My footprint may be a bit smaller, but I still don’t want to make that impact.
Thus, the composter is a great thing.
It arrived last night while I was downtown running errands (on my bike, another great life development that I will discuss later). After dinner, I set it up. Putting it together was pretty easy. There is a basket that goes underground, and two concentric cones that sit on top. They basically screwed together, and the cap screwed onto that. The end for assembly. However, the next step was to dig a hole big enough to bury the 24″ high basket and cover the lip of the top cones. That hole was about 30″ deep (so I could fill back in with some material that had good drainage under the cone) and about 3′ wide.
Digging holes is a lot of work. Here it is installed and buried into place.
Thankfully, it’s mostly unseen from the house and patio because it’s behind my magnolia bush. After I finished digging and cleaning up, I brought out its first load of food - all those wilted greens and squishy veggies that I’d had in my freezer waiting for trash day. As of this morning, it was composting, I guess. Here’s the view inside the composter - a place you don’t want to put your head and sniff around. (this inside view intrigues me in a weird way; a compost-cam of the inside would be amusing)
The smell is fine with the cap closed, so this seems (so far) to have met all my requirements. More in a few weeks as I see how well it works.
I really want to compost my kitchen scraps. I leave as many in the yard as possible (carrot tops, pea shells, etc.), but I still end up throwing out food that goes bad in the fridge.
Yesterday, I stumbled upon this article at Slate about composting. I don’t want to deal with a pile that I have to turn over. I don’t want something that will smell bad (to me or to my unsuspecting neighbors). I don’t want to add “brown” material because I don’t have any of that - I mulch everything up.
The Slate article reviewed several systems, and this seems like one I might go with: the Solar Cone Green Cone.
Has anyone used a system like this or others? Any advice on what to do and still meet my criteria above?
I don’t know if you can tell from this picture, but the POs did some crazy butchering on these doors. Apparently they were not the right size so they hand cut some of the doors off down the middle.
Notice the wavy gap.
This work is truly Cabinet Guy caliber.
To fix this, I got a couple pieces of half round and attached them to the edges of this door. It made me realize I need some clamps. For now, the vice grips worked ok. A coat of paint, and this looked quite a bit better.
This was a good project for a day that brought threatening weather.
