Sticker shock, Flex, Space

Yesterday morning I ran home to meet a sales rep from FHIA, the company that installed my impact windows at the old house. I was surprised to see it was the same sales rep that sold me the windows, a nice guy named Doug. So I explained to him that although I only mentioned the kitchen upgrade when I called in, I am also looking at having work done in both bathrooms as well.

FHIA does not rip out cabinetry, they reface it. My cabinet boxes are in good shape so I thought this could be a more affordable way to update the kitchen. I also indicated I wanted to go with a quartz countertop. Doug said they could also reface the bathroom cabinets and do the countertops to make everything look similar, an idea that appealed to me.

So after he took measurements of everything he pulled out his samples. He had samples of different cabinet style doors/colors. His quartz surface samples were numerous as well. I admittedly am not good at color/style matching but I came up with a cabinet door style and quartz combo I liked.

Doug got out his calculator and started adding up numbers. When he showed me the total my eyes got wide, damn close to 50k. You have to be kidding me. I was not shy about expressing my feelings about that quote, it was way, way more than I envisioned.

Doug immediately started in with ways to cut costs. His first suggestion was to have someone else do the counters, he estimated I could probably get them done for 5-7k less. It’s convenient when you have one place do everything but there are extra layers of profit taking in there as well from subs. He reran the numbers without the quartz counters in there and it was still more than 23K, which is more in line what I thought the initial quote might be, for everything.

Well these estimates were unexpected. My idea was I could get EVERYTHING I want updated on the house done for around 50K. I told Doug I would need to rethink my plan which in code meant “your pricing sucks”. I also wanted to get some work done to the master bathroom shower, the rough estimate he gave me for that alone was more than 25K, get the f out of here, that is ridiculous.

So I know have various courses of action going through my head. I went on to Angi.com, a site where established contractors can be contacted for estimates. I obviously need to speak to other contractors. I then also considered the idea of doing some of the work myself which would actually be me asking one of my friends who has a lot of handyman experience to help me. I would much rather just pay someone to do the work but I am not going to get raped financially for that convenience. The reality is the home is 100% functional as it sits now so there is no crushing need to do anything right away, if I don’t want to.

Originally last night I planned on taking a shot at putting together the stand alone pantry cabinet I bought from Amazon, two very heavy boxes were delivered to my door Tuesday evening. However towards the end of my day my friend from work that I play pickleball with asked if I wanted to go play at East Naples after work. Sure, why not, having the ability to do something spontaneously likes that, easily was part of the appeal of living where I now do.

Rich first came to the house since he never saw it. I gave him the 5 minute tour before we headed out, he liked it. When we got to the pickleball facility it was not full at all, a pleasant surprise. Rich has been recovering from an injury for 3 months so this was first time he had been back to the park in a long time. We wound up playing a total of 6-7 games. Rich was rusty at first but got better the more we played. Our last 4 games we played with two women where we rotated partners every game, it was fun. I really enjoy having the flexibility to do something like that.

So although I originally thought that deciding to play pickleball would make building the pantry a no go, I decided to crack the boxes open a little before 8PM just to see what I was looking at. I figured with 2 big boxes it was going to be quite the task.

Once I had everything out I figured it couldn’t hurt anything to start putting some of it together. As I did I realized it was actually going relatively quickly so I kept going. 90 minutes later the build was done and I had more than doubled my available kitchen pantry space. It was a very productive and fun Wednesday evening.