Wow! and Whoops!

We went over to the house tonight and were pleasantly surprised and surprisingly shocked. So, do you want the good news or the bad news first? I'll give ya the good:

The good news is that they got a LOT of work done today. Our bannister has been installed and stained, our bar countertop has been installed, and we have carpet downstairs. We have..lots and lots of carpet downstairs...

Which leads me to the bad news: There's too much carpet downstairs. You see, when we decided on the options for the house, we decided to go with hardwood in the foyer and the dinette. The sales lady, Sascha, told us that if we got those two options, then our hardwood would continue down the first floor hallway up until the great room doorway...creating a virtual sea of beautiful hardwood when you open the door (I think first impressions are important).

So what did we find when we arrived at the house? Hardwood in the foyer. Hardwood in the dinette. And grey carpet from the foyer to the great room doorway. My stomach jumped up into my throat and my heart sank down into my pants. I was angry, confused, and sad. Luckily, we noticed that Sascha was still working in the model when we drove through the neighborhood a few minutes previously.

Olivia and I couldn't contain our curiosity. We jumped in the car and went back to the model to find out if they messed up or if we had been misinformed. I felt like a crazed lunitic when I barged into the model, demanding an answer to our burning question, but I managed to contain myself and ask our question in a (fairly) calm manner: "Sascha: In the great room floor plan, if you have hardwood in the dinette and in the foyer, what happens to the first floor hallway?" She replied without hesitation, "It's also done in hardwood." AHH. She had given the correct answer. I'm not quite sure what I would have done if she had said anything else. I don't think I would have been prepared for anything besides what she said.

So, it looks like our builder buddies have a little flub on their hands. I'll call them in the morning to alert them to this problem. I kind of wonder how they could have screwed this up. Putting the grey carpet in the hallway butts it directly against our beige-ish berber carpet in the great room, creating a terrible clash of carpet styles and colors. I am expecting some resistence to my argument tomorrow when I call. In other words, I expect that Bob the Builder (that's not really his name; I just wanted to put that somewhere on this site) will argue that they are correct in installing grey carpet in the hallway. But I'm prepared with ammunition for that battle. Sascha has said that she will back me up on this one...and the way I look at it, if the salesperson sold it to me as a brick house with a sea of hardwood, then by golly that's what I'm going to get. Look for the outcome on this tomorrow. Until then, I've uploaded a butt-load of photos into the house photo gallery, so go check it out!

Posted by Jeff at September 24, 2002 12:55 AM