Kitchen Drama

In an ideal world, when you buy a brand new house, you move right in and everything goes smoothly. Right?! Wrong! As ideal as my little world may sometimes be--a la dream wedding, loving husband, etc.-- (insert gagging noises here!) the whole buying-a-house thing has been a very testing process. We closed on our house May 13th, and STILL have not unpacked the kitchen. BUT, that is no fault of our own.

Let's see if I can hit the kitchen drama high notes:

We signed the original contract with an upgraded kitchen, basically meaning fancier cabinets and appliances. Sure, I knew there were varying degrees of 'nice' appliances and building material, but I certainly didn't realize that there could be such a dramatic difference in pricing for cabinets! Anyway, somebody messed up and ordered the wrong cabinets/appliances for our house (of course they didn't mess up and order NICER products) and these less 'fancy' items were installed in our casa. The builder tried to butter us up by offering a refrigerator and washer/dryer. Before we made any decisions, I asked for the exact specifications of the items that were SUPPOSED to be installed versus those which were installed. That simple questions led them to also offer us a 42" TV and speakers for surround sound. Seemed fishy. Certainly they aren't going to offer us more than the pricing difference without us even asking... (Builder Salesman = Sketchy Used Car Salesman)

After some research and deliberation, we found that all of those peace-offerings still didn't add up to the difference in appliance/cabinet prices. Removable appliances won't add value to the house, whereas cabinets and stationary kitchen appliances will. Knowing this isn't a house we plan to be in forever, we decided that we would not accept their proposal. We wanted what was promised to us on our contract, and we were willing to push the close date back (dangerously close to our wedding date). OF COURSE, our contractual agreement did not cover any costs associated with pushing the close date back (even though it was their fault) and we would have had to cover bank fees/apartment fees, etc. (Yes, we had a lawyer look over it and there may have been a tiny loophole, but it would have caused much delay, court fees, etc.)

So we closed on time with the hope of having the kitchen remodeled before our wedding. Again, wrong! Cabinets didn't come in until Wednesday before the wedding, so they just started the remodel a week ago today. So here is my sad kitchen just waiting to be finished and used:

I will say, the cabinets are WORLDS better than the previous ones. They have soft-closing drawers and doors AND come with the hardware and pre-drilled holes for them. I'm pretty pumped about that because those drawer pulls can get expensive fast!

They still need to install the new appliances, re-sand the floor, touch up the walls and redo the back splash. This is what the back splash looks at one place:

Finally, they will clean the entire house (the first floor is crazy dusty), and only then will I be able to start unpacking kitchen stuff! All our kitchen-associated wedding gifts are just sitting in their boxes, salivating at being used in our new kitchen! (They'll have to wait until Eric gets home to actually be used, though, I'm not much of a cook when I'm by myself...)

Lessons learned: be WARY of home salesmen, do your home appliance research, NEVER expect things to go according to plan.

[Author's note: After reading over this (don't judge harshly if I missed some grammatical mistakes, it was a quick browse), I realized that this would have had a much harsher, more cynical tone if I wrote this while communication was actually being exchanged with the builder. I've gotten soft with time.]

xoxox