Let the Destruction Begin

I guess there is no turning back now. Materials are arriving. Work has begun.

They started by pulling apart part of the existing deck, some walkway, and a weird sort of enclosed shed thing (big enough only for a garbage can or small grill (have no idea what it was used for)).

Uncharted

We're not on the map. By that I mean we are not on Google Maps. The part of our neighborhood where we live hasn't been mapped yet. (Man, are they behind. My house is over three years old.) This means we aren't in any of the GPS systems either.

So, anytime anyone (deliveries, repairs, etc) has to come to our house we invariably get a call before they arrive. "How do you get there?" We have to give them turn-by-turn directions over the phone. Knowledge of this has caused me to attempt to preemptively explain it and give directions when we make the original arrangements. Alas that never works. We still get the call every time from lost or bewildered drivers.

So I recently dug in and found out there is actually a way to submit edits to Google Maps. It's a bit of a process, but my edits have been accepted.

So, by the time you read this I can report with glee that we're one step closer to being findable. I feel like Steve Martin running down the street exclaiming, "The new phone books are here!" I'm somebody now! They don't have the house numbers in yet; they don't have an updated satellite photo (probably not for a while), and the street name isn't even searchable yet, but at least we're moving forward. This only shows up properly in google maps copy-written in 2011. Through my extensive testing and research I've learned that many of the mobile apps and other websites still pull data from 2010.


View David & Liane Stewart in a larger map

At least now I can send people a link that will work.

Materials Starting to Arrive

Work is beginning. Of course, the workers just showed up yesterday. We were supposed to get a call to confirm the day that they would begin. No call. Nothing. They just showed up yesterday with stuff and started tearing apart the deck.

Liane asked them if they were coming back Monday and they didn't know. "It depends on where they tell us to go." This is going to get interesting.

Promising

Calm morning. Nice day. A rarity this spring. I'll be relieved when we get to the point where we can just "live" here.

It's Never Easy

Several articles of new furniture were delivered the other day. One was defective out of the box. Another was damaged by the guys unloading it out of the truck.

The one piece I was really anxious to get is a dresser -- some of my clothes are still in boxes. Guess which piece was defective out of the box and had to be taken back by the delivery guys? And guess which piece is now backordered from the manufacturer?

Sigh...

Boom...and another chunk of money is loose.

We finally pulled the trigger on the two major remodeling jobs (screened porch and new master bath). It has been quite an ordeal, going back and forth with plans and ideas, talking to different people, etc. Just trying to wrangle it all together and reconcile what we want with what is feasible has been incredibly difficult. I knew it would be, but man...  We've changed a lot of the details back and forth several times trying to zero in on what we think we'll be happy with, and who we'll be happiest working with. Ultimately one of the contractors stood out above the rest as someone with enthusiasm and a design aesthetic that seems consistent with our ideas. Can they execute though? That remains to be seen of course, but Liane did work with them some years ago when she worked at the architecture firm and they were always good.

We can agonize over all of this until the end of time. Must get moving (In the immortal words of my friend and former bandmate, Gene Carpenter, "Do something, even if it's wrong."). So, we spilled $16,000 of hard earned money to them for a deposit yesterday. Not a small chuck of change, but it's just the deposit to get the work started. Hopefully tens of thousands of dollars later we will be happy. We could buy a small house for what these two projects are going to cost.

That takes care of two of the jobs. There is also the kitchen remod, which is mostly about new counter tops, sink, etc., though there is also one additional cabinet going in, and we want to totally rework the area over the stove -- details (and final costs) still to be determined.

And then there is the landscaping we'll have to do to make the new deck space work with the rest of the yard, and the dock for the pond, etc. That's not going to be cheap.

Meanwhile furniture is being delivered today. Thank goodness for gainful employment!

Welcome to My World

The frogs remain. We've tried coffee grounds and salt water. They clearly didn't enjoy the salt water, but when it rained -- and this time of year it rains almost daily around here -- it washed away.

Try to sleep with this going on outside your window. Play it loud.

I didn't make this recording. It's actually worse than this because in our case there are none of the background sounds to mask it. We just have the moaning and the barking. There are some other, gulping sort of sounds they make too.

I'm afraid we may have to take more drastic measures...

Double Edged Sword

This is the other "edge" of having a body of water nearby. We spent a few hours the other day digging all this crap out of the water. Now we have to bag it all up and dispose of it.

How to Lose a Sale

As anyone likely reading this probably knows, I manage a large team of sales people. There is inherent distrust of salespeople for reasons I have written about elsewhere.

In short, some of them have earned the reputation shared by them all.

In our furniture buying extravaganza over the past few days one incident stuck out. We had seen a sectional couch at a local place. A place that as far as I know has a decent reputation. We continued to look all over in earnest, but ultimately kept coming back to that couch. Meanwhile we had seen it in a couple of other places. In my mind I thought that if all other thins were equal we'd go back to the first place to buy it. Being in the profession (of sales) myself I have some loyalty to the place/person who originally turns me on to something.

Then the Memorial Day sales started. Pricing all gets changed, and there are deals, or at least there are what appear to be deals. In some places, including the aforementioned place what it really amounts to is a rebundling of the items at what is basically the same price. Then stick a big, red tag on it and call it a sale. Whatever. That doesn't bother me too much. Any retailer would be smart to try to capitalize on the Memorial Day sale frenzy, and most people will not have seen the pricing before to know the difference.

What gets me (and most customers) is being treated like a fool. When asked about the lower pricing we had seen elsewhere the sales person actually tried to tell us it was a different couch, made with different materials and construction. Admittedly I hadn't paid that much attention to the details up to this point, so for a moment he had us thinking. But it just didn't add up. Come on! Really?! There are two different manufactured versions of this exact same looking product? Common sense thankfully took over. Still, based on the aforementioned loyalty, the fact that we weren't yet clear whether the other stores had the ottoman we wanted with it, and the fact that we were there, exhausted, and ready to get it done, I agreed to let him see what he could do on the price. He had to "call his manager." I was now getting cynical, which is not a good sign, though he probably really did have to check with someone.

He got close (on the price), but with all of this in mind I just didn't feel good about it. I left it up to Liane, and she must have felt the same way. We walked. Went to the other place and got it done. Had the guy not lied to us I probably wouldn't have been too gripped about the small difference in price.