Sometimes Building Just Sucks

Long time, no blog.  That's what happens when I am immersed in parent-teacher conferences.  Anyway, remember how we're including the good, the bad and the ugly here on our little blog?  We've covered the good and a little of the bad.  Now here's the ugly: sometimes building just sucks.

Like when we heard we were 3 weeks delayed, that sucked.  Or like the numerous times our builder has failed to be organized.  Just a few examples of that are the builder failing to send the plumber the paperwork he was supposed to have, or never--not once that I can recall--being on time to any of our meetings, or not responding to our emails.  Like ever. That all sucks, too.

You know what else sucks? When a sub-contractor tells you to pick out your selections and then you spend 8-10 hours researching and deciding, and then they tell you that those options aren't "available".  Yeah, that sucks, too.

Here's the story.  One Monday a couple of weeks ago, we met with the plumbing subcontractor at our request.  He had given us a PDF version of the standard plumbing fixtures, but we felt like it was tough to chose fixtures based on a PDF, thus the requested meeting.  At the meeting, he handed us this little booklet

and told us we could browse through it and choose whichever fixtures we'd like.  So Eric and I headed home, knowing there were some items we definitely wanted to change.  The plumbing subcontractor, Paul, had recommended we look at the Delta plumbing website, too.

In the midst of researching plumbing options of all things!

That same night, Eric and I spent about 2 hours each looking through the materials and websites, researching, and trying to narrow down our options.  It was a bit overwhelming, to be honest.  Then the next evening, a Tuesday, we again spent 2-3 hours each going through the materials and finally made our selections (subject to pricing).  Yay! Or so we thought.

More of this!

We emailed off our choices and waited to hear back on pricing. A couple of days later, on a Friday, I received an email stating that "Most of your items we can not get from our supplier but they did send us replacement items that look almost exact."

The bottom choice was our selection, the top choice is the replacement.

Now, we were not happy to hear this news since we'd spent 8-10 hours total researching our options and because we were told we could choose anything we wanted.  Not to mention the fact that although most of the items did look similar, the did not "look almost exact".  I won't go into all the details, but there were a LOT of emails sent back and forth (I count 25, to be exact). 

Say what?! 25 emails about plumbing fixtures!  I know, I know!

In the end, after 14 days, 25 emails, 3 different price quotes and approximately 3.6 kajillion hours (during conference week, no less!), it turns out we can actually get the original selections we wanted, and the price is actually pretty similar to the standard for most items.  So, long story short--we'll be getting most of the upgrades we wanted.  It just sucks that we wasted so much time emailing back on forth on something that should have been straight forward and taken very little time.  And it sucks that we have to be the ones to be on top of all these details, when that is really the responsibility of the builder and their subcontractors. So, yeah, sometimes building just sucks.  But enough complaining. I'm now officially calling this pity party over.  I'd rather be involved with these decisions than not and I cannot wait to see all of these pieces come together to create our home on the Lane!