Another Saturday morning

Last weekend, for the first time in about 3 months, I had nowhere to be on Saturday morning!  It was glorious!!!  Because for every other Saturday morning that I've been in town in the past 3 months, I've had a tile store, or a flooring store, or a granite warehouse, or a bath showroom, or any of a myriad of other home supply stores to run to.  Actually, that's not true...  I've had about 5-10 of one of those to run around to each weekend!  But not last weekend! :-)

What I've learned is that there are so many decisions to make, and most of them can't be made online.  You can read about appliance reviews all you want, but until you spend a day going to 3 or 4 different appliance stores and seeing them, you really can't make a good decision.  And with wood floors, you don't really buy that online, and the pictures aren't representative anyway.  And with bath fixtures, there are so many thousands of options that browsing through hundreds of pages on websites just gets overwhelming, and you have to see them in person.  And the problem with this is that I have a full time job, which most of these stores don't seem to understand, because they normally open at 9 or 10, then close about 4 or 5.  And they're definitely not open on Sunday!  So that leaves Saturday, when most of them close between 12 and 3.

So, most Friday nights I've put together a list of places that carry a certain house product in the area, then most Saturday mornings, Betsy and I get up and run around DC, Maryland, and Virginia (collectively know as the DMV, btw...), and visit as many of them as possible before they close...  One morning I even got up at about 6 am to drive from Silver Spring, MD all the way down to Woodbridge, VA (about an hour away) to get to a flooring store as early as possible when I was trying to find appropriate hard wood floors.  Because that's what you have to do!

As a fairly organized person, most of these trips had maps like these showing all the places in the area that sold the item I was looking for!

But finally, I think all the decisions are made!  The tile came in months ago, the bathroom fixtures are in, the kitchen is all installed including the appliances, cabinets, counters, fixtures, and lighting, the bathroom vanity is in, the bathroom counters are ordered, the wood floors are in, the light fixtures are ready to be hung, the bathroom hardware is in, and I could go on for another 10 minutes with this list!  I've keep a checklist in Google Keep (which, by the way, has been amazingly helpful in all of this, like digital post-it notes!  :-)  ) that I'm down to just 5 items on, and they're all figured out and ordered, just not quite in yet.  So at long last, it's just down to the contractors finishing the job, and I can at least stop running around worrying that I've forgotten to order something!  And at some point soon, I can return to having Saturdays free to actually do fun things!

Just a segment of the ever changing list of things to do for the house, showing a bunch of these checked off and done!  Of course the top of the list still has about a dozen open items, but that's much better than the 50-60 it held at its longest point...

And don't worry, there's an actual update on the progress, with pictures, too, coming up next. :-)