Deliveries: A Rant
This has been, by far, the most aggravating part of the whole construction process. If you’ve never tried to get one of the big box stores to deliver construction materials to you, let me tell you how it works. You go to their website and set your local store. You shop and pick your delivery date. Then the company completely disregards the store you set as your local store and sends your order to whatever store they want, according to arcane formula involving “inventory” and other unfathomable esoteric reasoning. We had one delivery for ONE item, that was coming to us from Lynwood. And another that was supposed to come from Tukwila. And yet one more from Mill Creek. And for each of these deliveries the ONLY people who can access the dispatch or answer any questions about arrival windows are the people at the specific store that’s delivering to you.
Which would be fine if they answered their fucking phones. Which, as you might have guessed from my choice of words, they often do not.
And once the pallets of lumber, drywall, fiberglass sheets, sand paper and tools are delivered you’re on your own for getting things inside. Yes, even if you paid for a service that explicitly says they’ll get it inside for you. Apparently that just means you paid extra for the delivery driver to drive the forklift inside your location. I mean, the website says house, and I don’t know ANYONE with a house that a forklift could drive into. But that’s beside the point, I guess. Turns out the only thing I can’t haul on my own is drywall, and that’s more to do with the fragility of the material than anything else.
And you know what? This is the such a small thing compared to the AMAZING support we’ve had during this project. You’ve shown up and pitched in every time we’ve called for helpers. We’re going to get the carpentry done enough for the plumber and electrician to begin their work in a few weeks and that’s incredible. And then we get to dig into the cleaning and painting on the bakery side to get it ready for the finish work of floors and moving furniture into the space. I can’t wait to show you this new home YOU’VE helped us build.