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.
Last night I emailed Cabinet Guy to check on my doors. He says:
Hello Jennifer,
Your cabinet doors are in.. Since these are custom door, the company is charging $145 per door.
First, I have no idea why he didn’t contact me to tell me the doors were in. He just decided to wait for me to find him and check.
Second, I reminded him very clearly that the only reason custom doors had to be made was because they sent the wrong cabinet in the first place. I can’t believe the dude is trying to get more money out of me. It’s been over TWO YEARS!!!!!!
More updates as we potentially reach the kitchen end game…
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.
My kitchen doesn’t have a heat vent. There are no walls where one could go but, more importantly, there are no ducts that run near the kitchen. The only way to solve this would be to rip part of the finished basement, run more ducts, and then probably take out a couple cabinets.
I do not need it. The room is pretty much fine, though it gets a bit chillier in the cold part of the winter. Earlier this month, I noticed that it was especially chilly by the dishwasher. I probably missed this before because the dishwasher is near the door and I don’t often stand there unless I’m letting the girls out and the door is open.
There’s not really a draft, but it’s a LOT colder under there. It makes sense since the dishwasher backs to an outisde wall and there isn’t much of anything under the dishwasher between the outside wall and the main kitchen area.
I decided to insulate this. I went to my local True Value. They were very hesitant to give me any insulation. I don’t know why but I had to finally tell them to take me to where their limited selection was so I could decide for myself. I ended up buying an insulating water heater blanket, cutting it up, and stuffing it in to a few gaps on the sides and into all kinds of spaces underneath.
It seems to have worked pretty well. I don’t feel the cold over there like I was. Better yet, I beat the dorks at True Value who thought my idea was a bad 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.
I figured it was time for a Cabinet Guy update. There isn’t much to update since the guy has not made a peep in a long time. Today, I decided it’s time to resolve this once and for all. I sent the message below to him and to Contractor Sal. Monday’s project: find a lawyer.
Dear Cabinet Guy,
Last spring Contractor Sal gave you measurements for the doors that I am still missing in my kitchen. If you’ve forgotten, there is a set of doors on the cabinet that was ordered/shipped incorrectly that have a big gap between them. You promised to order the correct doors along with trim because some was missing and the touch up paint (which you claimed to have in your possession over a year ago). I have yet to receive any of this or hear about it.
It’s been 20 months - nearly TWO YEARS - since I started this kitchen project, and I cannot fully express the magnitude of my anger that it is not finished yet. Please let me know this week when the new doors will be in along with the trim and paint. If I do not hear from you, I am going to start pursuing other means to force you to take care of this problem. It has dragged on far too long.
When I redid the kitchen, one of the new windows came with a screen that was the wrong size (and the little strip was hanging down, too):
This bothered me for a very long time. Finally, this summer, I ordered a replacement. I got it from Quality Screen online. They were great and the new screen is a perfect fit. I can finally keep the windows open in the kitchen. If you need replacement screens, I highly recommend them.
How do zucchinis like this happen to me? I pick them every day, I check on them several times, and then every now and then I end up with arm-sized squashes.
Anyway, I’ve been working on this all consuming project for work. I only fit in a couple hours of sleep trying to get it done, and then rewrote and rewrote again. When I finally finished it around 1 this afternoon, I was seized with the urge to make something real. I also needed to get rid of all the fruits and veggies in my fridge that would go bad next week.
I spent seven hours in the kitchen and came out with this:
That’s 2 loaves of zucchini bread, 12 zucchini muffins, two little ramekins of the zucchini bread, 2 small blueberry muffin ramekins, 6 pints of lentil soup, 2 pints of spaghetti sauce, and 3 half pints of blueberry orange jam.
My fabulous SIL Michelle and my 2 nieces are coming for a visit next week. This has created the perfect excuse for me to get things in order around here. There is still much lingering mess from the busy semester, and it’s nice to have a motivating deadline to get it all cleaned up.
That said, there is a LOT to do this week (I know you’d come whatever the state of the house, Michelle, but I’d be embarrassed if you saw it like this). I got up at 8:30 this morning, my usual time, ready to start on a big list of things.
Flashback to yesterday where I saw an ant in the pantry. I got the great idea to move one of the ant traps that Orkin left into the pantry just in case. Well, those are ant baits. They attract ants. Thus, they attracted ants to my pantry where I found a bunch of them when I put away the box of Cheerios from breakfast. I called Orkin who told me that I had a scheduled visit on the 22nd and I was absolutely not allowed to kill the ants in the pantry because it would mess with their system. The woman on the line did not seem to understand why I was completely not ok with just letting the ants camp out in there for a couple weeks. So I killed them. Windex kills them and it turns out so does GreenWorks. However, there were ants between the spice jars and on the tines of the wire shelves so, to get them all, I had to pull out and wash every little jar of spices and all the other stuff in there.
In the midst of this long stupid project, I had lunch (yes it took that long). When I was cleaning up, I realized that I’d forgotten to dispose of the pods from the peas I picked last night for dinner. I put them into the garbage disposal and ground them up until the drain clogged. I tried a few things to unclog it, thinking maybe it was just the disposal, but no. It was clogged all the way down. Luckily, I have a big red pipe wrench and have watched enough TV to know how to get into the trap under the sink. I was feeling all proud of myself until I realized that MY kitchen sink trap does not come apart. All the pieces were glued together.
I took many many steps figuring out how to get the black pipe from the disposal disconnected from the main pipes. After that, I tried snaking with the snake and with other stuff. I tried shop-vacing it (which seemed to work until I got everything reassembled). After about 5 disassemblies and reassemblies and a dozen calls to various members of my family, Brother Tom suggested I put it together, put some water in the sink and use the plunger on it. That worked! (One million points to Tom are hereby awarded).
About 5 minutes after I finished, Contractor Sal returned my call where I left a message about this poor trap situation. He came over and put in a proper one that unscrews. Now I am prepared with many skills and facilities in case this happens again.
In any case, it left a GIANT mess. Here’s about half of it.
So, by 3:30pm today, I ended up with a nicely organized pantry, everything back in working order, and very very little progress on my list of stuff to do. Just one of those days…
