Baseboard Blues

When Josh and I were over at this house this weekend, we noticed that the baseboard trim seemed a bit smaller than we expected. In fact, it looked smaller than the casing around the doors and windows, which seemed odd as we had selected a 6" baseboard and a 4.25" casing. I sent Rob an email about it last night, and was a little surprised not to hear anything back from him this morning as he is usually very good about responding to emails. I went over to the house this afternoon to see what was going on.

I found Jim outside with our string trimmer, putting the final touches on our newly-mowed front lawn -- what's left of it, at least. The house looked very different from the front.
The house itself hasn't changed at all, but the big trailer that had been sitting on our front lawn was gone. Well, not exactly gone -- just relocated to the back of the driveway.
Rob was inside installing the baseboard in my office. I asked if he got my email, and he told me that the company's server went down over the weekend so no one had received any email since Friday. Oh. I asked him about the baseboard and reminded him that we had selected a 6" base, but what he was installing looked smaller than that. Rob was obviously upset about the mistake -- and he's usually pretty unflappable -- but once he'd cooled off a bit we talked it over. Since we picked out the trim over a month ago, we couldn't remember what transpired well enough to figure out exactly how we ended up with the wrong baseboard. So instead of trying to decide who was at fault, we focused on fixing the problem. Rob asked Justin to remove all the baseboard that had already been installed when he comes in tomorrow, and then ordered some more in the correct size. I hope he can return all the unused stuff...

Meanwhile, John and Justin were installing the trim and door framing for the closet in the front bedroom. John constructed this as one piece and then they carried it into the room and nailed it into place.
Then he re-installed the old louvered closet doors. I think we may paint them a different color. The blue worked before, but it may not go with the new wall paint color. We'll see...
Upstairs, Ian was just finishing up for the day. He had installed the recessed shelf and some of the subway tile in the upstairs bathroom, but needed to consult with Rex about the details of the accent tile before he went any further. He asked if I knew exactly how it should look, but I decided to defer to Rex rather than making any pronouncements of my own, since I don't have any experience with tile layout and there's no going back once it's been installed.
On my way out, I noticed that Rob had Jim and Justin turn over the damaged lawn, re-seed the area, and set up a lawn sprinkler to water it. This isn't the best time of year to do this, but if it doesn't work, we can always try again.

I forgot to mention earlier that we also went back to the Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware outlets in Leesburg, VA on Friday evening. We found a medicine cabinet at Pottery Barn that we thought would work well in the master bath. It was originally $229, and marked down to $99. They only had one, but we figured we could check back for another one or hope for a sale. It occurred to us to find out if there was another Pottery Barn outlet in the area, and discovered an outlet center in Lancaster, PA that had both a Pottery Barn and a Restoration Hardware outlet. Josh called the Pottery Barn outlet and was told they had two medicine cabinets marked down to $159, and they were having a sale for an additional 20% off.

We decided to make a day trip out of it, so we drove up to Lancaster on Sunday morning (it's a 2.5-hour drive), had lunch in the historic downtown area, and then made our way to the outlet mall. We found a simple wall-mounted mailbox for half price at Restoration Hardware to replace our cool built-in one that became a casualty of the exterior stucco removal. The Pottery Barn outlet did have two medicine cabinets, but they were both marked $228.97. Since you can buy a pristine one at their retail store for $229, that didn't seem like much of a deal. We asked a salesperson to check the price for us, but they rang up as $228.97. She had no explanation for why they were only marked down by 3 cents, or why someone would have quoted us a different price over the phone. Finally I asked to speak to a manager. After relating Josh's phone conversation and the fact that we'd driven all the way up from Arlington, she agreed to sell one to us for $159 and give us the 20% discount. Yay!

The drive home took a little longer as we decided to take the scenic route part of the way and had to keep slowing down for horse-drawn buggies. It's a bit mind-boggling to see the Amish people calmly making their way through traffic in the midst of outlet malls, mini-golf courses, and motels. I wonder where they were going...