Nothing Happens At Ten

Not much to blog about, so I thought I would do a couple of reviews. First, Amazon.

We bought drapery rods and some other stuff from Amazon. But then, we all know about Amazon. ‘Nuff said. Here is a less-known online retailer:

We bought a lot of our lighting fixtures from LightingDirect. What enticed me to trust them was that I asked some questions about some of the fixtures, and they actually answered them. When I called on the telephone, a real person answered the phone, and then they were actually helpful! What a concept! We had a good experience with them, and are very happy with the fixtures we ordered.

Stay tuned to this blog. It looks like there might be another opportunity for some outrageous snow photos this week. (Is it Spring yet?)

Here is another snow photo to show how much of this stuff we have.

Every time we shovel out, we have to huck the snow over that pile. A well-meaning neighbor came over on Thursday with his snow blower to help out, but the snow blower could not throw it over the mountain, so it just stuck to the side and then slid back down onto the drive. We had to shovel it anyway. I guess the old back and biceps have > 8 horsepower.

Meanwhile, since we are giving out kudos to Big Box stores, here is one for Home Depot.

Once again, the actual experience exceeded the reputation. We bought a lot of our light fixtures there, lots of light bulbs, the bathroom mirrors and medicine cabinet, shelving for the basement, a roof rake, and so on. Most of it turned out quite well. We really like the tilting bathroom mirrors. Good stuff.

We got a little snow last night.

Yikes! It took most of the day to dig that out. Throwing the snow over that mound was a real challenge.

But we are out now and on our way again… a little sore, but not too bad.

So to fill up the rest of this space, here is another review to ponder.

Wow! When was the last time I could give a “Thumbs Up” to a Big Box store like Staples? Really! I mean, most of the time we just want to rant about slow, unfriendly service, and how the big guys have put the small guys out of business and they don’t care about the customer and so on and so on and yada yada yada…… but Staples really did work well for us. If you have been following this blog for a while, you will remember these:

We bought a bunch of these file boxes from them. They were about 2 bucks each. They are easy to put together, and they were sturdy enough for our moves. We ordered these boxes three times, and each time they were delivered the next day. Free delivery too.

The boxes worked out great, being small enough that we could not make them too heavy to carry. We had lots of boxes. Stacks and stacks of boxes. Boxes and boxes and more boxes. Boxes with boxes in them. Boxes in the rooms. Boxes in the hallways. Boxes in our dreams……….. Thanks, Staples… I think.

Of course, we had other boxes as well, donated by friends. Thanks to all who helped by giving us boxes. Now all we have to do is unpack ’em all.

We are not done with the landlord yet, and anything can happen, but I thought that I would post a preliminary review of them anyway because I can’t hold it back any longer.

The overview:

Why the Thumbs Down? Here is what they stuck us with (so far).

• They wanted us to sign a two year lease; we talked them down to “only” one year.
• They wanted fewer people in the apartment; we talked them into letting all 4 of us stay there.
• They made us pay the finder fee to the real estate agent.
• They made us pay for our own credit checks before they would rent to us.
• They wanted us to pay for credit checks for all 4 of us. We talked them down to only the two who are actually writing the checks.
• They tried to put an automatic, one year renewal into the lease if we missed the termination deadline. We talked them out of that trick.
• On day 1, their sewer drain backed up raw sewage into their basement. They ignored the spill for a day or two, and we finally called our own people to get it fixed and cleaned up.
• The hot water faucet in the kitchen let go and would not turn off; we had call our own plumber to get that fixed.
• The drain under the kitchen sink came loose; I fixed that myself. 🙂
• They stuck us with the lawn maintenance.
• They stuck us with the snow shoveling.
• Most of the windows had no screens on them, so we sweltered all Summer with closed windows. Their maintenance guy finally delivered the screens in October. They don’t fit the windows. Thanks.
• There were no instructions for the thermostat. We had to download those from the web in order to turn the heat on.
• There were no instructions for the smoke alarms. We ended up calling the fire department when the smoke alarms went off in the middle of the night.
• They never fixed the dangerous basement stairs as promised.
• They never covered the lumpy basement floor with a platform as promised.
• They never fixed the broken window in the attic as promised.
• They never gave us the extra keys they promised. They only gave us one (1) (uno) (eins) key for all of us to use.
• We had to get rid of the hornets in the attic ourselves.
• The stove had a cracked glass top. It took two weeks to get it replaced.
• The heat quit working Thanksgiving weekend; we had to call our own guy to get it fixed.
• And finally, adding insult to injury, we had to replace the batteries in their !@#$% carbon monoxide detector….. after we moved out.

OK. That is enough of that; I have violated my own 15 second rule. The spleen is vented. On to cheerier topics in the next post.

Now that we are in the house, I thought that I would post some reviews of the folks we dealt with to do this project. Some were great; some were OK; some were…. well…. horrid.

So, I will trickle out these reviews over the weeks. Keep in mind that I am not selling any of this. I am simply reporting our experiences with the people and services.

So here is the first one, PODS. The overall rating I give them is a thumbs up.

I was a bit leery of PODS when we started because they just seemed a bit too slick, but their service ended up being very useful for our move out of the old house. Being able to take a month to move our stored items from the house into the POD was just what we needed. If we had been required to pack trucks and move the stuff into self storage it would have taken much longer. Once the POD was in the driveway we got a triage going. We went through the items and put each one in one of three places:

1. Trash
2. POD
3. Apartment

It worked well.

The delivery and pickup people showed up on time and got the job done in spite of low hanging wires and snow storms. They were polite and efficient. The POD was clean as a whistle when it arrived… we tried to give it back to them in the same condition. The stuff in the POD arrived intact and undamaged.

The POD was not cheap, so if you have a fixed set of items all ready to go and need to store them, you can probably find cheaper storage. But for what we had to do, the POD worked out well.

We had another blizzard. We got 18″ of snow on the ground in a single day. But this time we did it right. Here is a photo of the Rav during the blizzard.

Which looks pretty good when you consider what it looked like outside the garage door.

Meanwhile, inside the house we were cozy, with smiling, tropical plants watching it snow.

OK. So it took us 2 1/2 hours to dig out. Nothings perfect.

Due to the forces of public interest (people want to know), I got up early this morning and sucked it up and ran an experiment. I turned on all of the lights in the kitchen, which in this new house approaches a small thermonuclear event, and pushed the “brew” button on the coffee pot. Due to the demented nature of the electrical system in that “other” house, I have developed an aversion to brewing under the lights, but I did it anyway to see what would happen in the new house.

Here is the result:

Nothing happened.

Well, that’s not totally true. I did get a nice cup of coffee out of it, but there was no smoke or sparks or sirens… just coffee. So nothing happened, even after I counted to ten (with my eyes closed and my fingers crossed).

We had heating oil delivered to the Fallapartment again because it has been cold, and the place really eats heating oil. Here is the disturbing part…. the bill came to $666.23. Here is something even more disturbing. Back in July, when we moved into the Fallapartment, the bill from the moving company was $666.50. Coincidence? I don’t think so. There is something evil about the place.