When a Simple Update Isn’t so Simple

And updating your kitchen with new appliances takes two months…

A new kitchen is exciting and getting rid of non energy efficient appliances that barely work is even more exciting.  So we shopped around and did our research for about two weeks, finally deciding on the warranty and sale price from Lowe’s.  We’ve gotten everything else for Das Haus home improvement wise there, why not go back for the appliances?

Little did we know that we were in for a saga.

One night we were sitting around, chatting with my future mother in law about the appliances and thought that we should probably check to see when it expired.  It was 11pm and logging onto the Lowe’s site, we saw it was over in an hour! For some reason we thought that we had a few more days to a week left but we were pretty wrong.  Normally we wouldn’t order something as expensive and detailed as appliances online, but we knew exactly which models we wanted and they were going to go up by at least 30% if we didn’t order then.  So we did it.

Well we had just opened our Lowe’s card, and they wanted to see our license to verify the purchase…but they never told us. So I went overseas for work thinking that everything was OK and left my fiancé to deal with everything.  They’re new online ordering system pulls appliances from different places, so ours were trying to ship from three different locations, the prices were wrong and they kept trying to tack on delivery which should have been included.  So for 10 days my fiancé is trying to get the right appliances to ship, while I’m trying to follow the email chain…from Sweden.

Right when I got home, and Christian was off of a torrential 3 weeks of night shift – which if you ask me is torture no one should have to endure – we decided to call to make sure that everything was OK with our order.  It wasn’t. After ten days of fighting to get the right order, the order was cancelled because we never drove to the store and showed them our card.  Again, we were never told we had to.  So we checked to make sure that we weren’t over the limit or that there was no fraud notice on the card and drove to the store to order there.

Glen at the McCandless store was so sweet and helped us through the process, and even saved us an extra $100.  So we were happy.  The downside is that it was going to take a month to get the dishwasher in.  We decided that as long as the order was right, we were OK waiting.  So we waited.  And two days before our order was supposed to arrive, Glen had to call and let me know that it wasn’t in yet, so we pushed the delivery day from Friday to Monday.  It actually worked out better for us.  Over the weekend (when Glen was off), we were supposed to get a call to update us on our order, but the call never came.  So on Monday morning, we called the store.

Now remember – we were waiting on the dishwasher.  When we called, they told us they were unable to locate the refrigerator…what did they do? Sell it while they were waiting on our dishwasher? So they told us to sit tight and they would call us back.  Again, four pm rolled around with no call – so we called and the guy was gone for the day.  Guess he didn’t want to call us and let us know that they still couldn’t find the fridge that was supposed to have been sitting there for a month.

At this point, I was livid.  I was already paying for appliances that they couldn’t find, let alone that they weren’t in my kitchen.  I got on twitter and started tweeting corporate.  The next morning our appliances were delivered and we were informed from the installation guys (who were as sweet as apple pie) that two managers were on the case that morning making sure that these were at house.

After all of this, the appliances are great, the kitchen looks amazing, and we can’t wait to start using them…two months after we thought we would be able to.  Better late than never!

The white cabinets that are in the kitchen are great and in nice shape after we cleaned them up a bit.  We decided to keep them and just replace the nobs, updating them from brass to a brushed nickel which looks like wrought iron.  We found some that were simple and not too expensive, again at Lowe’s.

Note to people who buy a 50+ year old house and want to update the appliances: Be prepared to really clean when you get the old ones out.  The dirt and dust under these things was making me cringe, if not gag.  Also, you might find a few surprises, like our dishwasher was installed with copper fittings which made taking it out harder.  In fact, the installation guys from Lowe’s weren’t allowed to touch these.  We were planing on installing the appliances ourselves, but this really solidified it.

On the other hand though, if we had had them install the fridge, they would have been able to quickly spot that one side of the valve for the water line was busted and saved us two hours of trying to make it work, while simultaneously sopping up water from the floor because our water shut off valves in this house don’t completely shut off water flow…

We were going to have construction junction come and pick up our dishwasher and over the stove microwave, but with installing the new stuff taking so long and forgetting about the old stuff outside, it’s since rained and snowed on the appliances, which probably means they are junk now.  I’m really hoping that today will be the end of this whole saga..

Of course the kitchen wasn’t complete until we added the Heinz Spice Box – a gift that my grandfather received for working at Heinz.  Gifts like these were given out every year and our family still has some of them, like the pickle truck piggy bank my grandmother received.