house-ing
Mood: irritated
Posted on 2008-02-10 14:36:00
Tags: phone pictures camerapics house politics
Words: 447

Yesterday djedi's parents were around and we got a lot of stuff taken care of with the house. One of the more annoying things was countertops. Long story short: I don't recommend buying countertops from Home Depot. So we went back and forth looking at different materials at Lowe's (like this one) and Home Depot. Really, they were about comparable in quality and price, but Home Depot's were $300 off, so we measured the countertops (as seen in this crappy cameraphone picture) and took it to Home Depot.

Well, they charge by the square foot, but what they don't say is that they charge for the waste material too - so we get charged for all the extra runoff in the crazy corners and stuff, and you pay for the space the sink takes up even though no countertops go there. That alone increased the cost around 50%. Then, you get charged for them to take away the existing countertops, which is I guess reasonable but they didn't say anything when we were there the first time so we had no idea. Also, we're leaving the nice tile backsplash in but I guess it's more work for the installers to work around it, so that's an extra $150. And the guy said that sometimes they have problems and it may be unavoidable that they damage it, so I thought that $150 covered the "expected cost" of fixing it. As it turns out, no, if they mess it up they don't fix it at all. Lovely.

On top of that, it's our responsibility to disconnect and remove the sink before installation and put it back and replace and reconnect it afterwards. And, as if spending $4K on countertops wasn't enough, they charged us $1 per "rounded corner" for a total of $7. Seriously.


Compared with this, buying carpet from Lowe's was easy easy easy and I would totally recommend that over Home Depot. Blargh.

Since countertops were way more expensive than we thought we're going to pack our stuff ourselves. We'll set a date when we hear about carpet but if you have boxes and/or a free evening to help us pack, we would be very grateful!

I'm liking having a cameraphone, although the quality of the pictures isn't great: a sign seen at closing (I guess the point is they don't get paid if you don't close so they make you comfortable - we were repeatedly offered drinks, they had plenty of pens, etc.), a sign in the wire aisle of Home Depot.

Tomorrow I leave for Houston for work. Whee!

Obama cleaned up yesterday, winning with 68% in Washington and Nebraska and 57% in Louisiana. Woohoo!


3 comments

Comment from yerfdogyrag:
2008-02-10T22:09:36+00:00

Ah, I'd have screamed if I knew you were going to try and do any contracting through HD. Don't do it - they don't tend to pay contractors crap and so the good ones don't tend to work with HD. Basically, HD collects a percentage of the money and just hires out to local folks for the actual work. You're better off just going with the local contractors, if you can find good ones.

Drop a note if you're going to be hiring out any work - we've got through a fair number of contractors in the past couple of years...

Comment from quijax:
2008-02-11T23:10:55+00:00

I'm sorry for my crap, then. The whole idea was that you wouldn't have to move it yourselves :(

As for wire, copper prices were going way up when I was an electrician. People have begun stealing new wire from building sites to sell as scrap. It's worth enough now to got through the trouble of stripping the wire. I'm guessing they've just begun to have trouble with theft in the store as well. Wire is heavy enough that it would be hard to steal, but it must be worth enough now to try.

Comment from gregstoll:
2008-02-12T22:58:46+00:00

Aw, no problem...it's a drop in the bucket!

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