Feeding the Home Improvement Beast

I spent my Labor Day feeding taking advantage of Lowe's twelve-months-no-payment-no-interest beast offer. I accomplished more than I could have alone because I paid Katie to be my shopping buddy. Yes, I paid her. Seven whopping dollars, for the entire day, not per hour. I can hear the judgmental voices already: You shouldn't pay her, she's your daughter. She's SUPPOSED to help you. However, if the people articulating those words knew how many times daily I interrupted the girls to bring me this or get that from a shelf, they might decide to keep it to themselves.

I hear some Billy Joel coming on (yes, I'm old) ...

I don't care what you say any more
'Cause it's my life
Go ahead with your own life
Leave me alone.

Once Katie and I agreed on a price (Me: "I need you to help me shop in Joplin today. I'll pay you seven dollars." Katie: "OK."), we loaded my chair, the leftover Pergo flooring I needed to return, and lots and lots of measurements and drove east.

We arrived at Lowe's around 11:00 a.m.--at precisely the same time as half of Joplin. The sunny, warm weather on the unofficial last day of summer evidently gave everyone else the same idea as mine. I sent Katie, squinting in the sunshine, to retrieve a cart on which to place our Pergo, which was like sending her across a Nascar track during the Indy 500. She finally chose to find a cart in one of those cart corrals rather than from in front of the store and trotted off across the asphalt. In the meantime I unloaded my chair using my Bruno lift, which squawks at an embarrassing decibel because the bearings need replaced. Together Katie and I unloaded the boxes of laminate, looking like Laurel and Hardy as we dropped boxes, tipped the cart and generally struggled as we giggled. Finally, finding a break in the traffic, we zipped across the main drive and through the jaw-like automatic doors of Lowe's, where I lost three hours of my life and hundreds of dollars to the home-improvement monster.

When we started the building project, I didn't have a realistic grasp of the number of decisions that would be required of me. For example, at the last minute Carl asked, "Could you pick up a couple of registers for the new bathroom ceiling air vents?"

"Sure. What size?"

"Oh, they're standard. Get a white one."

"Go ahead and measure it," I requested, and thank God I did. Lowe's provided at least thirty white registers: floor registers, ceiling and wall registers, louvred registers, 3-way registers, 2-way registers. You get the idea. Then I had to select the right size, which posed a problem. Carl had measured the rough opening at 4" x 10". Lowe's sold a 4x10 vent cover, but would that fit a 4x10 rough opening, or should I purchase a 6"x12" register? What I thought I could accomplish alone in one minute took fifteen minutes and a phone call.

Next I spent ten minutes choosing a handrail for our staircase (again with the choices!, only to realize a 12-foot rail would not fit into my Tahoe. Moving on...

I carried on a ten-minute conversation with a Lowe's employee about the pros and cons of an electric tankless hot water heater versus a natural gas one. I went against his advice, deciding to purchase electric instead of gas. Because Lowe's didn't have any in stock, I planned to buy one from Home Depot later that day, where they were also offering 12 months of free financing.

I could bore you with every example, but suffice it to say that every item I purchased required three times the selection-process-time I expected. Nevertheless, I left with 90% of the items on my list and drove to Home Depot.

Unfortunately, when Veronica, the Home Depot employee, dropped the electric tankless hot water heater into my cart, I noticed a collection of IMPORTANT INFORMATION written inside a big red explosion shape. Of course, I might as well have been reading the Spanish side of the box since I had no clue what "Volts 240/208v; Amps 120/101 (3 x 40 amps); etc" meant. Veronica called some guy from electrical and by the time I made my decision, four Home Depot employees surrounded me. Home Depot wasn't nearly as busy as Lowe's.

Feel free to skip this paragraph entirely because it's the equivalent of an I-told-you-so-nanny-nanny-boo-boo-you-never-listen-to-me rant. A year ago we contracted some major electrical work to wire in the building project as well as to bring our 1950s house up to code. At the time my brother-in-law, SuperEd, had recommended we have a 200 amp panel (I call it a breaker box) installed. When I requested a 200-amp panel, both Carl and the electrician pooh-poohed me like I was an ignorant female and instead installed a 100-amp panel. Guess what we need in order to power that snazzy electric water heater. That's right. The bright red explosion evidently explained that we must have a minimum of 150 amps--a 200-amp panel. It looks like we'll be hiring a natural gas guy to run some pipe, or whatever the lingo is.

When I told Katie we had to return to Lowe's her entire body sagged and I could tell she thought the measly seven bucks was highway robbery. I promised her some shopping time at Bed Bath & Beyond as well as a stop at Braum's on our way out of town and she picked up her step, seeing the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. When we exited the Tahoe at Lowe's we were flooded with the smells of suppertime emanating from the nearby restaurants and realized we had skipped lunch. Hunger hurried us and we purchased the GAS hot water heater in record time, feeding the Lowe's beast one more time before feeding ourselves.

All-in-all the day was an expensive success. Thankfully we have twelve more months to pay for it.