Well, the kitchen is finally installed. Ten months after the renovation began and only eight months beyond the scheduled move-in date! Not too shabby!!
If you are interested in learning more about the house and how you can purchase this newly renovated Chapel Hill estate, then visit www.726Bradley.com.
Finally we get to see what the cabinets look like when installed!
Countertops to be installed next week…
I didn’t mean to be so grouchy in my previous post, but that is how I was feeling at the time. The Summer-Long Kitchen Project has really been frustrating, especially considering that I’ve been in renovation mode for almost ten months now. Hopefully the time of living with no kitchen is coming to an end (soon) and I can be done with home projects for a while.
August in North Carolina was hot. We had successive days of triple-digit temperatures and have been suffering a drought for quite a while. During the extreme heat, I noticed that the gas mileage on my Honda Element dipped to an all-time low of 16.7 MPG. Usually the vehicle gets between 22 and 24 MPG. I knew that a vehicle would get worse gas mileage under extreme conditions, but it was my eloquent engineer friend Nathan who said “hotter air is less dense by a linear factor, so you use higher throttle settings for the same output you’d have needed four months ago, but the stoichiometric ratio doesn’t change.” This combined with constant use of air conditioning would help drag us down to the sub-20 MPG club.
Also, the drought has been causing animals of all kinds to seek out other sources of food and water as their environs run dry. I have seen lots of deer on my property (usually, but not exclusively, at night) and found the dried skin shed by some snakes. Overall, I’d say that the brutal summer heat has been tough for everyone. Now into September, we are just starting to see relief. Ooohh, the mountains sound good right now! Time to plan a trip to Asheville. (Amy, I’m crashing on your couch! FYI.)
Until then, please join me in praying for rain!
The new kitchen cabinets arrived exactly a week ago. In that time, they have taken up a lot of space in my living room and done nothing for the storage/organizational potential of my kitchen. Although Lowe’s promised a ‘cradle-to-grave’ sort of project management, I have had to chase them around at each stage and make literally dozens of phone calls each week. No one ever calls you back and when you call them, you can expect to be on-hold for hours. Courtesy is not the hallmark of the construction industry and its associated building services.
One cabinet was built incorrectly and somehow got past Quality Control. Another cabinet and a piece of toekick molding did not show up at all. I now have to wait another week for those to show up before they will even schedule my install. Want to re-do a home? Here is my advice. Save yourself a lot of trouble and worry — Never renovate anything! Just buy something functional that you can afford. Otherwise you may wind up with more problems than you’ve got time to solve.
The folks at Lowe’s said I had to have all the appliances on-site so that the cabinet installers could make sure things fit properly. For the past few weeks, I’ve had these sad, lonely appliances sitting around going unused. A gas range that can’t cook. A dishwasher that can’t clean. A sink that doesn’t exist. And a refrigerator that can’t produce filtered water & ice (because it needs the sink installed first).
I am walking on Cloud 9 today because I finally got to order my new kitchen cabinets and countertops!! And it only took two weeks of going to Lowe’s every day for hours at a time to get this done!! When I walked out of the store after having put in my final orders for everything, I was radiant with joy. Then I got in the car and my iPod was playing one of the pieces from Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. So there I was driving home, beaming and bouncing my head from side-to-side as if I were directing the orchestra with my head movements. It was rad!
A functional kitchen here someday will be!
So here I am in New York City attending the 2007 Virtualization Conference (a part of the larger 2007 SOA World Expo) and trying to learn a bit more about the future of enterprise computing. I had not done any traveling in a while and also had not been to a conference in ages, so I’m feeling very lucky to be here. And while this is essentially the premier SOA/Virtualization conference in the States, I still find the ambiguity of conference speakers to be frustrating.
I am so used to hands-on techie learning (a la SANS Institute) that to hear everything abstracted and spun into business-speak often leaves me less than satisfied. Thankfully, the speakers are not solely focused on plugging their companies and products. And from what I’ve heard so far, most of the large vendors are working together (via a SOA Best Practices Working Group) to make all of our lives easier in the future. (*fingers crossed*)
Regardless, New York City is beautiful right now and I’m enjoying it as much as possible. Nice sunny days and warm nights without the brutal humidity that usually keeps folks locked up in their air conditioned spaces. As a bonus, I got to take in a good portion of the massive Gay Pride Parade that took place yesterday. It was totally awesome to see so many happy dancing and smiling people flooding the city. When I get home I will post my photos to flickr, so please check back for that link.
Anyone who knows me is aware that I am totally into financial market analysis. And as the sharp analysts acknowledge, there are markets everywhere. Some of these markets go unearthed for decades until someone like Bill Gates or Donald Trump figures out how to make money off of them. Other markets are so large and encompassing that they are right in front of our faces, yet we often fail to acknowledge them.
Last week I went to buy some stamps from the US Post Office. When I ordered, the young lady asked if I wanted “The Forever Stamps” to which I replied “What is that?” Well, the Postal Service has finally figured something out. People absolutely hate the fact that USPS keeps raising the price of stamps, but never seems to add anything of value to either their service or to their customer service offerings. People also seem to abhor having to purchase new, more expensive books & rolls of stamps every year or face the nightmare of matching one, two, or three-cent stamps to their existing, now-non-compliant stamps.
Viola! The Forever Stamp is born!! They cost the exact same price as the 41-cent stamp, yet the Post Office makes the outlandish claim that “These stamps will work forever — no up charges, no extra stamps to buy.” I was inspired by this massive technological advance in USPS technology and at the same time dumbfounded by the fact that one stamp could remain functional forever, while the ones sitting next to them will be useless in 12-18 months. “Yes, I will take the Forever Stamps,” I said in the carefully balanced voice of a hypnotist.
Since that fateful day at the Post Office, I have spent countless hours marveling at this bold, unexpected maneuver by the USPS bean counters. Yet often I wonder “Did they do the math right?” I mean, a speculative buyer could literally make millions in future trading on the Forever Stamp market.
If we bought just $100,000 of these Forever Stamps, then in 10 years we could reap profits near $1.7 Million (based on current upward stamp cost projections). We all know that stamp prices go up. None of us knows why exactly, seeing as they occupy the same musty buildings and employ the same curmudgeonly staff from year-to-year. Highly doubtful that any of their overhead costs mushroom at a rate comparable to the stamp prices. Thus, via this estimation, Forever Stamp futures is a strong place to stow away equity for a rainy day.
Who would like to go in on this guaranteed money-maker with me?
Happy Memorial Day, y’all! I think you should celebrate by buying a new (used) car!!
HOLLA!
Maybe I should stop taking pictures in Carrboro parking lots, but the availability of strange sights just increases each day.
I have no explanation for this because there are no HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes in our area. Maybe the driver just likes the company?