murphy's law

So, I feel guilty even posting about this. I do LOVE our new house and I'm SO happy to FINALLY be in it. BUT, there are a few odds and ends that are still unfinished and are driving me CRAZY!!!

We've been in our house almost three weeks now and STILL haven't closed. The bank decided that we needed to have a rail on our patio. I figured we would but our general contractors managed to slip it by the inspector......which is okay really because now we're getting it ourselves and paying for it out of pocket and won't have to pay their percentage on top of it. Of course, the rail that we want is more expensive than we had hoped, so we weren't going to go with it....but then decided that we really should get what we want instead of wasting $ on something we'll want to change out down the road. So the guy who's doing it for us is trying to get it done ASAP. In the meantime, however, our 6 week interest rate lock-in has expired. The bank extended it 10 days but told us that if they have to extend it again we'll have to pay. THAT is not so much what's bugging me, just an update....

We're still waiting on the electrician to come back and level and hook up the pendant lights over the bar in the kitchen and fix the lights on the back of our house (they won't turn on)...

They tore up our driveway last week and came back and poured a new one Monday. It was just not really smooth at all. The guy who did it claims that he got a bad batch of concrete the first time around...I don't know if that was really the reason or not, but the fact that he was willing to come out and replace it says a lot to me. It looks much better now, BUT we can't drive on it for four weeks (from last Monday) so I can't park my van in the garage until then. AND they messed up some of the stucco around the garage door tearing out the old stuff, and the old stuff is still sitting in a huge pile next to our driveway...

We STILL don't have a shower door in our master bath -- at least not a full one. Our door FINALLY came in to The Glass Shoppe last week and they didn't get around to coming out to install it until Friday afternoon. The guy they sent had NO IDEA what he was doing. He smelled horrible (which I realize doesn't effect his ability to install a shower door, but thought I would add anyway) and he kept talking to himself. We went with a frameless door and he told me that he had never installed one before. He drilled lots of holes through the tile, then when he went to hang the door I heard him say "Oh shoot! That's not going to work. That's not in the right place. How did that happen?" So he drilled more holes and told us that he would fill the other holes with grout....and that he had some at his house and figured any color would work... It took him 3 hours to get just the door portion on, by this time it was after 5 so he said he'd come back on Monday to add the stationary pane that's supposed to cover the rest of the shower opening. Monday afternoon he called to say he was on his way and wanted to know where our extra tile was so he could "fix" the tile he had drilled extra holes in. I could only imagine what would happen if he started messing with our tile and it wasn't pretty, so I called our general contractor, who called The Glass Shoppe and told them we wanted our tile guy to fix it and they would need to pay for it. Of course, our tile guy can't get out here until next week...and they can't do anything else with the door until he fixes the tile. Matt (our general) came out to check on the new driveway and take a look at the shower door and realized that the door isn't even in the right place to begin with. There would be no way to install the stationary pane level with the door where it is now, so they have to re-install the whole thing anyway. AND the guy stripped several of the screws that came with the door, so I'm just hoping they can even get it out of there now. Some other guy is supposed to be coming to fix it -- he better know what he's doing!...

We STILL don't have blinds on our windows. We ordered them from a local small business that my cousin used and was quite happy with. The lady came out and measured for them the Saturday before Memorial Day. They're supposed to take 10 business days. Of course, she couldn't put the order in until Tuesday because of the holiday, so that meant that this past Tuesday should have been 10 days. I hadn't heard from her so I called her on Wednesday and she said she had called to check on them and they were still in production in Pennsylvania (or somewhere). She's not sure why they were delayed, but I am -- because they are for *MY* house! I have mixed feelings about covering the windows anyway because of our great views, but the sun comes up directly through our bedroom window and I've been awake by 6 pretty much every morning since we moved in, this morning it was closer to 5:30. It's summer and I should be sleeping in, I don't even get up that early when I have to get my kids ready for school! So I'm tired and I'm sure that's not helping my irritation.

One last thing that's really bugging me, while I'm at it here, is our appliances. DON'T EVER GET GLOSSY BLACK APPLIANCES!!! I didn't want glossy black appliances for the same reason I didn't want stainless steel appliances -- because I didn't want to see lots of fingerprints. But the guy who sold them to us explained that they're much easier to clean than textured appliances because you can just wipe them off. He didn't bother explaining, however, that they scratch EXTREMELY easily. Our fridge and cooktop (which is stainless steel) were scratched before we even moved in. Then Camden found some of his magnets last week while I wasn't watching and decided to put them on the fridge....and slide them around. So now it's even more scratched, and I noticed scratches on the dishwasher the day before yesterday. ERRRRR!!! I e-mailed Whirlpool to ask what they would recommend to remove the scratches on the fridge and they wrote back (3 days later) and said there's nothing we can do about it. I can't believe they'd even make appliances that scratch so easily.

Anyway, thanks for listening to me whine if you've made it this far. Hopefully everything that could go wrong, has now and things will be a little smoother from here out (knock on wood!).