This is a temporary placeholder for a post I am about to write about our adventure with Home Depot’s window coverings department.
I will say this: we haven’t had window coverings on our big bedroom windows (pictured here) since we moved in, and it now looks like we won’t have them for awhile yet.
Update to come later. :(
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LATER:
So here’s how it aaaalllll went down. Read on.
Our newly renovated home needed new window coverings. We went to Home Depot to buy inexpensive cordless cellular blinds for the two windows (each) in each of the girls’ bedrooms and in the two bathrooms downstairs. A few of these had to be trimmed by Home Depot and we are happy with them.
Since we had saved a few dollars on those window coverings we decided to spend a bit extra on the windows in our bedroom and the large window in the family bathroom (which isn’t a traditional bathroom window because it’s one we reused from elsewhere before an exterior wall was demolished).
We knew that Home Depot was having a big sale, so we waited until then to go in and order our blinds. We knew what we wanted: cordless, room darkening (for the bedroom), and with a top/down mechanism (this means that the blinds can roll up from the bottom or down from the top). We went through the books and looked at all the fabric samples. It goes without saying that the cheaper blinds come in a very limited palette and that the “designer” blinds have a better colour range. (I think this is a total ripoff, but anyway.)
So we went with Levolor blinds for all four windows (three in the master bedroom, one in the bathroom) and handed over our measurements, which were in centimeters, because you know, we live in a country that uses the metric system.
The lady handed it back to us and firmly suggested we go home and remeasure. Inches were required here. At this point Mark was getting testy. He asked why she couldn’t convert centimetres to inches. She pointed to where 179 centimetres falls on her measuring tape and said it wouldn’t be accurate if she did it. Okay then. And then we waited another 30 minutes or so while she rushed around to each department trying to get a print out of our order. It was a long night at Home Depot for all.
So we went home and remeasured. My thinking was that if we were going to buy expensive custom blinds the measurements better be precise.
I didn’t have time to rush right back (the Home Depot is a 30 minute drive from our home) so within a couple of days I returned with imperial measurements in hand. The lady we were dealing with wasn’t there, so I spoke to someone else. She took one look at the paperwork and expressed some surprise. Apparently some things were input incorrectly. She had to enter everything into the system all over again.
“Oh,” she said. “And the price is going to be different.”
“Uh, higher or lower?” Because it was kinda going to kill me if it was higher. Our four blinds were going to cost us as much as a new TV or mattress would have…. purchases we are now postponing.
The revised order turned out to be about $100 lower. Fine. New printout. Order is placed. I go home.
I was happy to receive a phone call from Home Depot yesterday, informing me that our blinds were in. Yay! Blinds! Our neighbours would surely be happy not to see me in my loungewear and Mark would finally stop complaining about living in An Actual Fishbowl.
I drove out there - 60 minutes in the car there and back - and lugged them in the house.
I was out with Sarah later one when I got the text from Mark. I’m including our entire short conversation here for your amusement:
There is no additional text after Mark’s last one at the bottom there. I was too stunned to write anything. So I just went home to face the music, the sad sad beige music. And that’s when I realized that it wasn’t a joke, it was real life, bashing me in the head with 175 cm long window blinds that were NOT Whisper White.
Fast forward to this morning, when once again I awkwardly lugged the box into the car, dropped the seat down, and drove the 30 minutes to Home Depot. I parked, grabbed a cart, and lay the box across it, hoping to navigate Safely And Without Incident to the customer service desk.
I was determined not to cry - from anger and frustration and helplessness and the expense and just for feeling like I want all of this to be OVER ALREADY - but I could not prevent the tears from welling up as the box slid off the cart and crashed on to the pavement, right in the middle of the parking lot right next to the special entrance for the contractors… several of whom were sitting in their dusty pickups, watching this lady mouth unmistakable cuss words as she picked up the pieces and replaced them clumsily in her mangled box.
I wheeled my sorry self to the customer service fellow, who remembered me from the day before. With pity in his eyes he told me to bring my blinds to the decor desk, which I did. There I was greeted by a sympathetic lady who immediately reached for the Levolor books we spent so much time pouring over on that other long night. At first I thought that she was preparing to prove that the mistake was mine. I steeled myself for a prepared speech about how custom blinds can never ever be returned, but she quickly agreed that they were closer to Sand than anything else and had to be go back.
So back they went. She said someone would call me when they came in and she set me up with temporary blinds, free of charge. We went through the checkout and I walked into the cool morning air, tears welling up again, thinking ahead to the time I will have to come back here once again, and load them in the car once again, and bring them home once again. They better be right next time.
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