For The Birds

I am so grumpy right now.

And it is all due to a series of home maintenance / DIY projects that have not gone according to plan.

First, there was the AC unit that got smashed by the ice dam. The technician came with the wrong part that had been packaged into the correct box. I’m still waiting for the correct part to come in so that it can be repaired.

Then the garage door.  The door delivered was not the door ordered. It was a step up in quality from our other door (which is a good thing), so the installation went forward. But the windows do not quite match. And I want them to quite match. The installer is not returning my phone calls. I really don’t think this one is going to turn out well. I sense a scathing review on Angie’s List coming up.

In assessing the winter damage and getting the house prepped for painting, I decided seven of our windows needed to be repaired or replaced. The current estimate is at $7600. For those of you who need help with the math, that’s over $1000 per window!

As you saw in my last post, my brother and I managed to get a floor put down in the outdoor shower at the lake. But the night I came home I woke up anxiously worrying about how well it was going to drain and if it would get disgusting and slippery.

While I was up at the lake, my husband dropped the soap dispenser into one of our bathroom sinks and cracked the sink. And by crack, I mean put a hole in it. This is an under-mount sink that was an absolute pain to remove because of the silicone that had been applied four years ago. And now I’m desperately trying to find the exact sink since sinks come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. The sales rep is not returning my phone calls.

The one I think I need takes 5 weeks to ship.

Can anyone use a handle?

Finally, Dave and I went up to my mother-in-law’s to do some home maintenance up there. My job was to replace the door knobs and dead bolts on the front door and the back door. I had done this at my brother’s house in Wisconsin, and it was a piece of cake. Not so much in this instance. There was a quick trip to Home Depot, some drilling, and a little damage involved. I managed to get the dead bolt from the new front door set and the door knob from the new back door set installed on the front door. (It’s a long story.) At 9:30 that night, I gave up, and we went home. The next day, I figured out what needed to be done after carefully reading the instructions. (Don’t say it.) Now I want to go back and make everything the way it is suppose to be, but she actually likes the front door with the back door knob and wants me to leave it as is and get the same knob for the back door.

The bushes, however, continue to have my back.