What is “rabbit holing”? That’s when you start looking for a new dining room chandelier and basically spend two hours a night for a week searching for the perfect one that won’t be more than your house payment. Then you find it and it is back ordered and isn’t expected until Christmas of 2024.
To say my timing on doing this addition was a little off, is an understatement. Every purchase has felt like trying to get Bruce Springsteen tickets. The costs of lumber and labor have skyrocketed. Even IKEA is picked over and covered with furniture and shelves that have “Temporarily Unavailable” tags.
Thankfully, from this perspective, I have literally been buying things for this project for years. There has been laundry room tile in my garage for so long I had forgotten what it looked like. Buying ahead, in this supply chain nightmare, has been a blessing. Except I can barely walk in my garage.
Unfortunately, one thing I didn’t buy was windows. That was left to my contractor, who apparently hadn’t done window ordering recently. He said we had plenty of time. He was wrong. We ordered June 17th. The timeframe they gave us was two months instead of two weeks. That timeframe has come and gone. They are scheduled to show up next week. This has pushed the whole project completion date back to possibly October. If we get lucky.
I ordered a door from Lowe’s. The day it was scheduled to be delivered, they sent me an email saying they had cancelled the order with no explanation. I re-ordered it, but delivery wasn’t an option. It had to be picked up in the store. Again, no explanation.
Forget calling to get answers. I tried calling Lowe’s one day 15 times and never got anyone to pick up the phone. Floor and Décor just plain doesn’t answer their phones at all certain days of the week.
The other issue has been the constant changes to the design, due to what I want to call, “Surprise Moments.” I will go into some of those in more detail on another blog, but it goes without saying, none of these have been happy surprises. Simply put, what it all means is I either had bought things that didn’t work and/or had to find things that would work.
I finally decided that for my own sanity, I had to make decisions, suck it up and get everything that I needed. My credit cards are sad, but I feel like I can finally move on with my life. For now. While I was writing this, I got an email saying the fireplace that was coming tomorrow is now on back order.
Rabbit hole, here I come.