Madeline's Castle!: January 2011

Our final major project was the carpeting on the stairs and upstairs nook. This was quite the process. We decided to go with Home Depot because they were considerably cheaper than Lowe's. Let's just say you get what you pay for. First they had to come to the house to get a measurement. They told us they would be at the house anytime between 12 and 2:30 one Saturday. 5 of 12 I get a phone call saying if nobody showed up in the next 5 minutes the guy was leaving. Since I was running late and couldn't get there fore 15 minutes he left. Since this was the Saturday before Thanksgiving, we had to reschedule the measure for 2 weeks later. This time it was Nate's turn to wait for them to come and of course when they called that morning the said they would be there starting the one hour Nate needed to be away from the house. After much complaining to the company, they finally stopped by in the morning and spent a grand total of 5 minutes measuring.

Next came trying to pay for the carpet. You'd think this would be a simple task yet Home Depot can't make anything simple. They have a check verifying service that denies checks if you've never written a check with them before. Since we were writing a rather large check and haven't written a check to Home Depot before it was denied and once it's denied you can't use that account with Home Depot for 7 days even though it is a perfectly working account everywhere else in the world. After a very heated discussion with the very unhelpful manager at this company we decided to just walk away. (I looked up this company on the BBB and they have 1250 complaints against them and will deny checks for 5 dollars). The next day we looked into all different companies but non of them could beat Home Depot's price in a timely manner. So we took the cash out and went back to Home Depot to pay for our carpet in a way they would actually accept.

Finally the installation day came. They were supposed to call that morning to let us know when they were going to show up. Instead our doorbell rings at quarter of 8 in the morning. After checking my phone and email I find that instead of a call they decided to email us that the guy was supposed to be there between 12 and 3.... not 7:45. After a call to his manager we had to send the guy away. ( I was very unhappy at this point). At 12:30 they guy finally showed back up at 4 hours later was finally done. The kicker? I didn't notice until way to late that he had installed the WRONG carpet. It was the correct color but a different pattern then what we picked out. I however do not want to deal with this though and the carpet looks good so that the end of that... My only advice to anyone who's putting in carpet is to not use Home Dept.

Sorry for the rant but this was a very frustrating process. We are really glad it is done and it looks really nice to have it finished. To brighten the mood a little, here are some fun pics from the holiday season plus a pic of the back porch with pictures hung.