I am STILL Sick of remodeling!!

And I don't have any more pictures to go with this blog!

This comedy of errors just continues and continues and continues. Remember I told you about Willy, the flooring manager who had a less than desirable "phoneside manner"? Ok, I finally gave up and called him yesterday since we hadn't heard from Home Services in Tampa. Remember, he said that they would call us? So, I call him and he says that he never told me he would send my order up to Tampa. That was someone else's order. When I told him I still had the message on my machine, he said that he guess he had gotten confused and called us instead of someone else. Then he said that he had passed our order on to "Blanche, the expediter". And he told her that we wanted it installed in JANUARY!!! I almost screamed into the phone and said that I had NEVER said we wanted it in January. We are having family coming at Christmas and want it done by then! He said, ok he would call Blanche and then someone would call us back. Well, you guessed it. No phone call.

So this morning I sat down at the computer and compiled a documentation of the whole thing which has been going on for a whole month. Then we decided to make the trip back to Home Depot--half hour trip one way, remember. We went back and found the name and make of the carpet we had picked out and wrote it down. Then we went to one of the desks at Flooring which were all vacant. After a bit of a wait, we decided to go up to the front desk. When the girl there asked if she could help, I pulled out the documentation and told her the whole sad story. She looked up our order on the computer and when she couldn't make head nor tail of it, finally decided to call a store manager. Yay!!! So, Vonda, the store manager comes out and we tell her the story. When she sees my documentation, she also looks at the computer and is aghast at what we have gone through. She calls Mike in Flooring. Remember, he is the guy I talked to on the phone several times back when we thought we were putting laminate in. She also looked up our Vertical Blinds order and said that they were at the installers. She called him and left a message and promised that she would follow up on Monday with that and get those installed sometime next week.

So, we go back with Mike who tries to make sense of our order and says that we had too many people working on our order. Well, duh! I swear these people never work 2 days in a row and if they do, they are in a different department. However, Mike did tend to be the most knowledgeable of all of the people we have talked to in Flooring--including Willie--who we met today. He said that the guy who measured for the flooring and did a moisture measurement should have told us that they wouldn't install the laminate. If he had, we would never had had all this mess. Mike finally made sense of our order and said that, as we had thought, the carpet had never been ordered. The order was on the computer but it hadn't been sent! In the meantime, Vonda came back to make sure things were going ok and said she would check on Monday on the blinds and flooring. Mike made up the order, sent it, and gave us a copy of the order which we took up to the front desk where we finally had the old laminate bill cancelled out and the new rug order entered.

I think (fingers, toes, and everything else crossed) that we finally just might be seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Mike did say that this rarely happen and he profusely apologized. He said that they have to be multi taskers to work there since they will be talking to one customer, get a call from another, then someone else interrupts and sometimes, like in our case, things go awry.

I'm not sure I will ever order flooring at Home Depot again but I really don't have a complaint about too many of the people we have encountered there. They have been very friendly and I think honestly thought the job had been done but it just kept getting passed from peron to person and no one followed up. At any rate, maybe I will sleep a bit better tonight. I sure hope so--even if I am still sleeping in a plywood floored fishbowl!