kimmers for life

Still Homeless: 2 Shitty Appliances

So guess who never showed at 430? Or even 530? By 615 I called the store, and the following conversation ensued:

WOMAN FROM STORE: Hello?

KIM: Hi... Um, this is Kim, we spoke earlier about having my appliances picked up...

WOMAN FROM STORE: Yes! At 430.

KIM: Right... well no one's been here yet and no one has called me.

WOMAN FROM STORE: He said he was going at 430. You get home at 430.

KIM: (oh jesus here we go) Yes. Well, it's 615 and like I said, I haven't heard anything.

WOMAN FROM STORE: Hmmm. Maybe I will call him. Maybe he is coming, I don't know. Maybe tomorrow.

KIM: Well see, tonight would really be best, because we're having some work done tomorrow.

WOMAN FROM STORE: Maybe I will call him. He said 430.

KIM: Ok... well, can you call me after you speak with him? Because if he's not coming I may need to make other arrangements.

WOMAN FROM STORE: Ok! I will call you right back.

*35 minutes go by*

WOMAN FROM STORE: Hello?

KIM: Hi... Kim again... so did you call your delivery guy?

WOMAN FROM STORE: Oh. Yes. He didn't answer.

KIM: So....

WOMAN FROM STORE: But I called him this afternoon? And he said he was on his way to rent a washer? And I told him, don't rent a washer, get one from my store! But he was looking at a washer, and that was at 430, and then he was coming to get your appliances later, at 430? (Apparently the delivery guy exists in some kind of time warp.) So he may still be coming. I don't know. It's kind of past 430.

KIM: Yeah, by about 3 hours.

WOMAN FROM STORE: I will call him again.

KIM: PLEASE call me back after you do, so I know what's going on.

WOMAN FROM STORE: I will call you right back.

*an eternity passes*

Needless to say I have heard not one word from this woman. I've called her approximately 57 times today but she's apparently smartened up because she's not answering or returning my calls. I had a faint hope that maybe the delivery guy would call me himself, but that's fading with every passing hour. Meanwhile my POS stove and dishwasher are sitting on old towels in my living room, which frankly is insulting the hell out of my Crate and Barrel couches (which have been shoved to the side to make room for them).

My oversized armchair is no longer anywhere near lined up with the TV. This makes me angry.

Almost as angry as the fact that I now have NO IDEA what to do with these damn things. Even if I managed to drag them down two flights of stairs, across the courtyard, and out to the parking lot.

WHY IS NOTHING EVER SIMPLE?!

Is it 430 yet?

Today's assignment: find homes for old stove and dishwasher. Immediately if not sooner.

On Saturday, our new stove and dishwasher are being delivered. This means that between now and Saturday, I need to get rid of our old appliances. (Ideally TODAY, since our cabinets are getting torn out tomorrow... I'm a bit of a procrastinator.) I happened to mention this need to my realtor who referred me to a local place he said would buy the old appliances AND come pick them up... which, score!

Except when I actually called them today, it turns out that they DO pick your stuff up, but they don't pay you anything for it. Still, the stove and dishwasher are both pretty old, and I'm not even sure that the dishwasher actually FUNCTIONS, and time is kind of an issue here, so I agreed. (Also: if I never post another thing on Craigslist it will be too soon.) The woman I spoke with said her delivery guy would call me to set up an appointment to come get the stuff. Sounds good, right?

About 2 hours later my phone rang and I had the following conversation:

MYSTERY CALLER: Alo! Kim? (uninteligible rapid fire Spanish ensues)

KIM: (frantically trying to discern identity of caller, he knew my name, it can't be a wrong number) Um, hello? I'm sorry, who is this?

MYSTERY CALLER: Kim? Alo? Spanish?

KIM: No... I'm sorry, I don't speak Spanish (a slight lie, I will admit, but omg, this guy was talkingsofastIcouldn'tunderstandasinglewordIpromise)

MYSTERY CALLER: No? Ok! (continue rapid fire Spanish, fortunately I caught the word for "stove")

KIM: Oh! Are you calling about the appliances?

MYSTERY CALLER: Yes! (continue rapid fire Spanish)

KIM: I'm sorry... um, do you speak English? Are you trying to set up a time?

MYSTERY CALLER: Alo? Kim?

KIM: Yes, I'm here.

MYSTERY CALLER: Alo? Alo?

KIM: I'm still here.

MYSTERY CALLER: Alo? Alo? ALLLLLLOOOOOO?!

KIM: (wtf man, why does this shit always happen to me, I swear to god) Sir --

*DISCONNECT*

KIM: %$^%!

About 10 minutes later, my phone rang again...

WOMAN FROM STORE: Hello? Kim?

KIM: Hi, this is Kim.

WOMAN FROM STORE: Um, my delivery guy? Went to your condo? And, ummmmmm, no one was there?

KIM: Right... that's because it's 1:00. I'm at work. So is Nick.

WOMAN FROM STORE: Ohhhhhhh no one is home?

KIM: (getting annoyed) NO. No one is home. You told me your delivery guy would make an appointment with me, not just show up.

WOMAN FROM STORE: Ok, so no one is home. Ok. So when are you home?

KIM: I'll be home right after work, around 430.

WOMAN FROM STORE: Ok! 430! I will send him.

KIM: So... does that mean right at 430? Or sometime after 430?

WOMAN FROM STORE: You're home at 430!

KIM: (giving up entirely) Ok, great. Thanks so much! Bye!

I mean honestly... am I being ridiculous here to expect a little more organization than that? This store is picking up our old appliances - which they will then either resell or break down and sell the scrap metal - for free. I feel like the least they can do is schedule a freaking appointment.

Hopefully they don't actually show up at 430, because I definitely planned on making pasta for dinner tonight, and I kind of need the stove for that.

Someday I Might Actually Have a Kitchen

Tonight Nick and I have to go grocery shopping for food to get us through Saturday. Currenly I'm trying to come up with Meals That Don't Require a Stove, because this Wednesday our kitchen renovation starts. On the plus side, by Friday we should have new cabinets! On the minus side, by Tuesday night our stove and dishwasher have to be unplugged and out of the kitchen, and our sink/associated plumbing all need to be disconnected. And won't be hooked back up until Friday (if we find and schedule a plumber by Friday, which frankly is a big if). So basically, for at least a couple days I'm working with a toaster oven. And no running water, unless I want to use the tub. I'm envisioning some lazyman's dinners like grilled cheese and chicken tenders... which, to be honest, doesn't sound all that bad, especially those kinds of meals take all of 5 minutes to make.

(I promise when the new kitchen is in, I will start branching out in the cooking department. I will. You know, sometimes. When there's nothing decent on TV and none of the blogs I read have updated.)

In the end, we ordered the Stellar Snow countertops. It just seemed like the most practical choice given that when we buy a house in a year or two we plan to rent this place out. Also honestly, we'd gotten kind of attached to the color scheme and backsplash and everything else we'd chosen to match that damn countertop. Unfortunately, the counters won't be in for another 3 weeks or so (yep, that means I am without countertops for 3 weeks... I foresee a lot of eating out in our immediate future). So for 3 weeks we will have beautiful, sparkling white cabinets and (hmm, here is where I suddenly realize I actually have no idea what will be filling the void the old countertops leave behind. Empty space? Some kind of temporary fake counter? Will I seriously not even have a place to prepare food? How is it possible that 2 days before demo I still have so many blanks in this process?) One thing I can say for certain, however smoothly installation goes we will not be using this place again. The whole process has been very disjointed and I feel very uninformed overall. Also, I HATE that they won't do the plumbing, or even coordinate a plumber for us.

I'm thinking the Stellar Snow will either make our kitchen look amazingly bright and clean, or we will walk in and be BLINDED by all the white. Fingers crossed for the former. I'm thinking once we get the stainless steel appliances in and get the walls painted (a beautiful grayish green color) there will be enough contrast to all the white. If not... well... at least the kitchen will look more open.

The more renovations we do, the more I start to feel like when we buy a house, it needs to be move-in ready. This stuff is too damn stressful.

Garbage Disposal Woes

Last night I had a Blond Moment that quickly went horribly, horribly wrong.

It started out responsibly enough. I had good intentions. I was cleaning up the condo and making fajitas for dinner, waiting for Nick to get home. After i finished cutting up the chicken, peppers and onion, I shoved all the scraps down the garbage disposal.

The garbage disposal that I had never previously used or even so much as tested. Oops.

Needless to say, I flipped the switch and absolutely nothing happened.

Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit.

Annnnnnnnnd about 30 seconds later Nick walked in the door. I'm sure every boyfriend loves coming home to hear, "Please don't freak out... I promise it was an accident". He did a fair job of not losing it, but he was clearly Extremely Concerned about the next steps. Which... so was I, considering I figured we were about a day away from Eau de Rotting Meat in our kitchen. But NO WAY IN HELL was I sticking my hand down there to retrieve anything. The reset button had no effect. Turning off the power and then turning it back on had no effect. Nick's suggestion can be summed up as "shop-vac" but for some reason, this made me a little nervous. You could say I was a bit reluctant to stick the vaccuum hose down the sink and hit "on". My ultimate solution was to Go Read Blogs.

Very wisely, Nick did not push the issue. But by today, I knew I had to Deal With the Situation. So I borrowed a pair of plastic tongs from Nick's mom, and fished everything out of the disposal. Piece by excruciating piece.

I was going to insert a picture here, but for real when I uploaded it I had to swallow a gag. So I'm going to spare you the horrifying details, but let me just say, we have chicken marinading in the fridge for dinner tonight and every time I open the fridge to get something I have to bit back dry heaves. My box of Frosted Flakes is suddenly looking like a fantastic dinner option.

Oh! And even after I removed Every. Single. Disgusting. Scrap. from the disposal... the sink is still draining reallllllly slowly. Alarmingly slowly. So I'm thinking when the new sink goes in next week, we may have to add a new garbage disposal to the mix.

Man, for such a small place we've sure found our share of issues in less than a week!

Just kidding, New Condo, if you heard that. Really. The truth is I love you like a fat kid loves cake. Flaws and all. You're my first real homebuying experience and I love that. I bought you with a boy who I love and am building a future with, and I love that. I love your little kitchen window that overlooks the adorable little brick courtyard and I love your tiny wrought iron balcony that I can sit on and people watch. I love the glass paneled french doors leading to our bedroom, the half wall between the kitchen and living room that means I no longer feel isolated when I'm making dinner. I love decorating you and buying pretty things for you. I love that I can walk outside and I am a 5 minute walk from restaurants, bookstores, the movies, the library. After less than a week I know that this is going to be a good, happy place for us.

Condo, you... complete me.

But seriously, that garbage disposal thing, that was pushing some boundaries. No more horrifying surprises please!

More Than a Little Obsessed with My Countertops

So! I have accepted the loss of our Stellar Snow countertops surprisingly quickly. (Mainly because I figured I pretty much had to.) So yesterday afternoon Nick and I headed to a local stone place to check out some new options. We originally were dead set against granite because, if this doesn't sound totally crazy, the patterns in granite tend to be large and swooping, and we preferred the smaller patterns we saw in the quartz Silestone we looked at. However, a few minutes looking at granite slabs and we had found 5 that we loved, and had ordered estimates on all of them. To get the estimates worked up, we needed a layout of our kitchen, which we had the place that's doing our cabinets (and was doing our countertops, until the Stellar Snow Incident) fax to us at the local stone store. I happened to glance at the fax, and what did I see listed under counter selection?

STELLAR SKY.

Take a moment to let that digest. What was the countertop we wanted? The one we went down to the store to look at maybe 6 times? The one we TWICE confirmed the details of, both verbally and in writing? That would be Stellar SNOW. As in, THEY TRIED TO ORDER THE WRONG FREAKING COUNTER and didn't even realize their mistake, EVEN after the Silestone company explained that the color they were trying to order had actually been discontinued. Even more ridiculous, the Stellar Sky has been discontinued for at least a month... I remember looking at it when Nick and I first started this whole process and seeing the big "DISCONTINUED" sign slapped over the sample. So basically, they walk us through the whole order process, confirm same order process with us TWICE, finally go to place the order, hear that it's been discontinued, and just drop it? They can't be bothered to so much as glance over the paperwork a second time??? Honestly, at this point I'd cancel the cabinets we ordered from them, but a) we've already paid for them, b) we got a much better price than we found anywhere else, after some haggling anyway, and c) since we've already moved in, I don't think I can handle pushing back the installation date. Especially because that would ALSO push back the counter installation, which would also push back the sink, stove, and dishwasher installation. No thanks... didn't really plan on having our kitchen remain in a state of construction until October.

So! I'm gritting my teeth and accepting that I'm stuck with them for our cabinets, but I'll be damed if I take their suggestion to "find something else I like" from their (limited) selection of counter materials.

I also LOVED the guy we talked to at the place we went to yesterday. He was so much more knowledgable about the product, and so much more willing to really walk us through the whole process. He gave us samples of all the granite we liked, so we could take them home and see how the looked in our place. He gave us brief histories on all of the granites we liked. He told us once we choose a color, we can pick a particular slab, and even what portion of the slab we want to fall where in our kitchen. It was just so personal, and Nick and I both felt really great about it. Happy bonus? He's also able to get the counters installed much sooner than the last place, which is fantastic, because a kitchen without counters sounds kind of... stressful. Where "kind of" means "incredibly".

This of course bring me to, Which Granite to Choose? I think we've pretty much eliminated the sand colored sample (I don't want white or beige walls) and the two grays (nice, one of them especially) but maybe not as distinctive as we'd like? I kind of wanted more of a COLOR.) There's a very pale green that we couldn't get a sample of that I loved, but again, the paint colors. The biggest issue at play here is that I had my heart set on a blue color scheme for the kitchen and living room, and I'm having a hard time letting go of that. Which leads me to Choice #1, Nick's favorite and one of mine:

This one is absolutely beautiful, and the only option that actually contains blue... a pretty, shimmery blue that looks like mica. It's got really small patterns that look like little brushstrokes, and I could keep my plans for blue paint on the walls.

Choice #2 is one we saw in the showroom, and looked absolutely beautiful. It's a very dark, veined green. The problem with this one is that I'm not sure what color I would do for the walls (bear in mind that we will have white cabinets):

  I really like this one, and it's probably my second choice. Honestly the only thing holding me back on it is stessing out over what to paint the walls that will go with both our white cabinets and our chocolate brown couches. Also, its maybe a little darker than I think would be ideal for our (small and narrow) kitchen.

Decisions, decisions.

UPDATE:

Nick just informed me that he thinks we should go back to our original choice of Stellar Sky... SOMEONE PUT ME OUT OF MY MISERY. I think I am bored of countertop shopping. I think if I am forced to look at our options ONE MORE TIME my head will explode. So maybe I should just agree to the originally scheduled Stellar Sky.... (all the more tempting because I have already fallen in love with paint colors to match it).

But I Wanted Stellar Snow

Soooo to start this post off I should probably backtrack a bit and reveal that we bought a new place! Yayyyyy! A tiny, itty bitty little condo (but in a really fantastic, fun location) that we closed on.... um... about 2 weeks ago. When I was being lazy and awful and not posting. Sorry!! And this tiny little spec of a condo was, let's say, not exactly in ideal condition when we bought it. To which we said, ehhhh, it's so tiny, how much can it really cost to just gut the place?

Answer: Surprisingly kind of a lot, actually! (But here I will interject with an EXTREMELY GRATEFUL shout-out to Nick, who made the Executive Decision that this time around, we'd pay someone else to do all the work. Because honestly, I just couldn't bear the thought of living in such a small space WHILE trying to renovate it floors up, amatuer style, after work and on the weekends, in a sea of scattered and un-put-away-able belongings. Aka, Our Last Home. And Nick, because he is wonderful, took pity on me. Smart man.)

First step was floors, which actually worked out extremely well IN THE END. We got a great deal on the wood, and a great deal on the installation, and the guy installing it is prompt and conscientious and doing a fantastic job. However - we paid to have the stuff delivered, solely because our condo is on the 2nd floor and across a courtyard from the parking lot, and I'm lazy and delivery was fairly cheap. So Nick runs there on his lunch break on delivery day, presumably just to let the delivery guys in... and the delivery guys have DUMPED 30 BOXES OF FLOORING IN THE PARKING LOT. Because apparently they "don't do stairs". And Nick, not anticipating this obscene development, has gone to the condo by himself. And I'm back at work with no car. And Nick therefore proceeds to spend the next two hours dragging 30 75 lb boxes of wood up to our condo, one at a time, by himself, and then trudges back to work with his arms rubbed raw from the boxes, and bruises on his hip from the balancing act required to get the (long) boxes through (multiple) doorways.

But oooooooooh my pretty, pretty floors:

The kitchen was another bumpy road... one that currently, is not resolved quite as nicely as my oh so lovely new floors. I feel like I go to the freaking kitchen store every other day lately. If it's not one thing, it's another. Which I will admit, has mostly been down to our own indecision... we've gone from maple cabinets to white, scallopy arches to simple, slightly rounded arches, standard size cabinets to ceiling height, traditional hardware to modern... you get the picture. The one contant in the kitchen renovation process has been the gorgeous siletone countertop we immediately fell in love with and essentially designed our entire kitchen around, from paint colors (blues! and green! my top choices and a perfect match) to floors to switching over to the white cabinets, foolishly gushing to each other about how great our (as yet unpurchased) stainless steel appliances will look against all that brilliant, sparkling white:

It's gorgeous, right? And just the thing to really brighten up a very, very small kitchen? Well as of today it's also discontinued. Please excuse me while I go pout for the next 3 hours in preparation for trekking BACK to the kitchen store, where I will inevitably hate every other option because I WANTED STELLAR SNOW.