Pictures Speak: December 2005

A break from house blogging

Christmas was a nice, relaxing day- and we really needed a nice relaxing holiday. It was quiet and fun. See pictures below.

Putting together the legos!

Santa and Rudolph were here!

Santa brought a remote control dinosaur!

Ready for Santa and Rudolph...Guard the treats Catepillar.

The tree is topped...thanks Little Prof. V.

A Christmas Present for Mr. Prof. V

Today, Christmas Eve, a Saturday, was a gorgeous day here. It was almost 70 degrees and sunny. We decided to go to the house, so we could show some friends (Math Prof and his son) the progress. They haven't seen it in person since the day of the fire.

Low and behold, the siding guy was there working at 3pm on Saturday afternoon- and it is Christmas Eve. Not only was he working, but he got the backside done except one small spot.

The man who has been doing the siding seemingly by himself is a small, older man. He gives definition to the term wiry. I am not sure his ethnicity, not that it matters. Well, actually it matters, because I am not sure he totally understood our thanks today. We hung around playing soccer until he was done. I tried to tell him how much it meant to us for him to be there today, but I don't think he really understood- which is sad because his gift to us was one that was beyond our greatest expectations.

I don't know his name. (I will find out.) However, I hope he has the most wonderful Christmas because he made ours that much better. The first picture below is the two sides of the house which are completely done. Given his progress, I suspect he has 2-3 more days of work for it to be completely done.

View of the side and back with new siding!

Closer view from the back

View from the back

A picture of the foyer looking into Mr. Prof. V's office. The colors look nice together I think.

Another foyer view. Again, I love the Indian Corn.

This is part of the foyer in the Indian Corn we were worried about. It looks awesome.

Prof. V's office. The color is Sagey.

This this is the progress on the siding between Wed and Friday. Given that only one person is working on this, it is pretty amazing that that much has gotten done. I think some of the back got finished on Friday as well. The siding guy was there working. He is pretty amazing to watch. He is so focused and so efficient.

This is Mr. Prof. V's office. The wall color is Pearl. It looks really good.

The new siding. This siding creates a seal around the house which should really help with the insulation. This material which looks like stryrofoam but is much softer, is really amazing.

Christmas Presents

There has been lots of progress this week, but still not enough to get us back in the house until late Jan at the earliest. However, seeing the progress makes that time seem so much closer.

This week they started painting inside. The Master Bedroom, Little Prof. V's room. Mr. Prof. V's office, Prof. V's office, the guest bedroom and the formal dining room and living room were all done on Wed- at least first coats. They still have to do trim and touch ups. The color for the formal dining room and livingroom- Indian Corn- is awesome. We were planning on using it for the foyer as well, but it is pretty intense, so we may have to ask them to repaint that area. It might just be too much color.

They started on the siding. The siding is cool stuff. Rather than the traditional vinyl siding we are going with an insulated version. It is really cool. Close up pictures later.

The new garage door is in. They were supposed to put in the bathtubs and fixtures on Thursday in anticipation of inspections. Hopefully, that happened.

Oh, and I got a call from Great Indoors. Supposedly the lights are in! I guess, we will go there today to see.

Happy Holidays!

New siding

New Garage Door

Formal Dining Room and living room paint color

Granite Counter Tops

Yesterday, I finally made it to see the potential slabs of granite for the counter tops. After two delays last week for weather and traffic, it was nice to finally get this taken care of. Going down to Va, I was still sure that the Shrivakashi Gold was the material we were going to use. I love this stone- at least other samples of it I have seen. The slabs they had were really pink. The samples I saw looked more like the less pink of the two pictures below, but those pictures are of the same slab.

Ivory Chiffon was one of our choices for the bathrooms, but we weren't sure about it. The more I looked at it, the more it seemed to be a better choice for the kitchen. It has the deep red flecks I wanted, but it is less dominated by a color (pink) and seems like a more flexible choice. While we are painting the kitchen a deep red, with the Ivory chiffon, we could change the color entirely. With the Shrivakashi they had, we would be locked into some version of red or grey.

I forgot to take a picture of the slab for the bathrooms; it will be bianco romano, I think. It is absolutely gorgeous. I will try to find a picture of it.

Another Ivory Chiffon close up, again color is clearer but pic is blurry

Close up of Ivory Chiffon- picture didn't come out too well, but shows the colors

Option Two- Ivory Chiffon- has dark red flecks and dark metallic grey, but it predominantly cream and yellow

Ivory Chiffon again

Shrivakashi Gold- same slab- it looks less pink here

Kitchen counters- Option One- Shrivakashi Gold

"No Hassle"

Originally, this was going to be a post about Capital One and the fall out of the Great Indoors debacle. However, with a bit of reflection, Capital One isn't really the problem. They may not have handled things in the best way, but they at least were following a system that had the customer's needs closer to the forefront. This is a rant about Great Indoors!

(Not to leave you hanging about Captial One, basically, after the multiple charges at Great Indoors, they froze the account but didn't notify Mr. Prof. V, so when he went to buy tires he was stuck at closing arguing with Captial One about paying the bill. Cap. One was the only card he had with him at the time. The worst part about it was that the light bill had been paid off and the Cap Card was empty between the GI incident and buying tires, but their fraud alert program was in place, so it was quite a hassle to get it taken care of.)

Now, Great Indoors is a different story. I called to check on the lights to make sure that they would be delivered to the store etc. Since we need to purchase appliances for the house soon, I also wanted to see if the issue we had was a standard problem at GI, so that we could decide whether to purchase them at GI or go elsewhere.

When we checked prices and timing at Great Indoors before the light incident, they said they could get the appliances in 2-6 working days and could hold the appliances for delivery on a date we specified- and they had slightly better prices than elsewhere. These were all requirements based on the intricacies of our rebuilding project.

When I spoke with the "manager of the day" at GI, she first tried to just pass me off the managers of the departments. When I insisted that this was a more general issue, she seemed irritated and rushed. ( I called right after opening, before it should have been too busy.) I asked if she had a moment to talk because she really seemed like she didn't want to deal with me. She sighed and said, "is this going to be complicated?" I said, I am not sure, but I am in the process of trying to decide whether to buy all my appliances for my kitchen from you or not. Since that is a significant amount of money, I am not sure I want to spend it at Great Indoors if I am going to encounter the same problems." She grudgingly allowed that she had a few minutes to talk. I summed up the issue as simply as possible. "I ordered lights from you a week ago, and despite the fact that we knew what we wanted before we came in, it took three hours to process our order, and..." At this point she cut me off with, " Let me transfer you to the lighting manager." As I tried to say, "but this isn't a lighting issue." There were a series of clicks and then I was disconnected.

I tried to call back, and I was told she was unavailable. So, that made my decision for me. I will purchase the appliances elsewhere, and I will not shop at Great Indoors for anything else. I am not hopeful about the lights, but at least those are not a disaster yet. If there is a problem with GI getting us the lights, I actually have found several people who are in the lighting business who could certainly help us out- since we already know what we want.

The moral of the story, I guess is, that big business is not better business. In the future, I will go with the local small business over the big business any day.

This makes me smile!

Looking Outside 2

View from the inside.

looking outside 1

The downstairs doors are in!

"What's In Your Wallet?"- A Rant, Part One

I have waited a week to write this post. I thought maybe I would feel differently with a little distance, but I don't. This is a rant about Great Indoors and Capital One.

Last week, we went to purchase our lights for the house. This wasn't actually a hard thing. We chose the light fixtures several months ago and went back to confirm those were the fixtures we wanted. It wasn't a hard decision, and we weren't really tempted by anything else. So last Sunday, the three of us went to Great Indoors. Normally, I would have hesitated to take my almost 3 year old, but since Mr. Prof V. and I had already decided what we wanted, it should have only been a matter of ordering the lights, right?

It took over 3 hours to order. Why, you might ask? I am not sure. Great Indoors computer system is archaic for one. Their staff people, while very nice, are just one step above incompetent. It was a complete fiasco. Mr. Prof. V had to chase our 3 year old around the store for three hours while I had to stand with this guy laboriously entering each item into multiple screens. Once the orders got in, he had to track down the printed order. Then when one was wrong, he had to start the process over again.

Finally, after two + hours, we had all the orders in hand- there where 5 different orders. They had to create an order for the things they stock and had in stock that day (order #1), an order for things they normally stock, but which they were out of (order #2) and then separate orders for each of the other items which they don't normally carry and which come from different companies- separate orders for each company (orders 3, 4 and 5.) I can understand that, I guess, but the computer was so slow it made each order take 20 minutes or so to complete given the number of pages and fields which had to be completed.

When we finally got all 5 orders together and verified, it was time to pay. I was using Mr. Prof V.'s Capital One card which is the card we decided to put all the big house purchases on. Then the salesperson explained that he would have to ring each of the orders separately. I had a bad feeling about that, and I asked him if there were any other way to do it. He said no. They couldn't ring it up on one bill. I still don't understand why.

So we get to the 5th purchase and the card is blocked for security reasons! Too many charges at one time. This post doesn't begin to convey the frustration we felt at that point. Little Prof. V was running around like a maniac. Mr. Prof. V was trying to keep him contained, but after 3 hours of standing around, that was almost impossible. I really wanted to walk away at that point, but there was just one order left and then we would be done. So I put it on another card and walked away frustrated and unhappy.

There are so many levels of frustration. One, the Great Indoors' process is unbelievably cumbersome and anti-customer service. In this day and age, there is little excuse for such an antiquated computer system . Their sales people are not trained in good customer service. They didn't once acknowledge that this was a cumbersome, inconvenient task. They didn't acknowledge the fact that we had a young child with use. (They could have told us, this is going to take awhile come back in 2 hours so we can review the order.) Nor did they apologize for how long it took or how inconvenient it was. Then enter Capital One, the "No Hassle" Card. They certainly added to the hassle.

The lesson, don't shop at Great Indoors for big purchases. Stay Tuned for Part Two, where the hassle continues.

Lights

So all the light fixtures in the house have to be replaced. We found the lights we liked awhile ago, but given the difficulty of ordering things, we decided to order them ourselves. I haven't found pictures for the foyer chandelier or the dining room chandelier yet, but they are really cool.