Entry 539: Hectic

As most of you know from a previous post, Julie's mom has bought a house in the Kansas City area. She has been having some work done to it; such as taking out all of the wallpaper, painting the entire house, and having hardwoods installed throughout the house. The good news is that the house will be all done this weekend, the bad news is that now we need to make sure that everything is ready for her to move in. Now that we are back from vacation, we have been spending a lot of time over there helping make sure the house is ready. Thursday was an especially hectic day and let me give you a small breakdown of the day:

• Nancy has been paying a really high price for her cell phone, so we decided to go to ATT and see if we could decrease her plan or even if her contract was up.  Upon getting to ATT they told Nancy that they could not help her and that this was the cheapest plan that she could be on.  It is scary that they are charging her this much and she does not even have a data plan.
• In the morning Lance took measurements of all of windows, so that they could go and look at blinds for the house.  We checked prices at Lowe's, Home Depot, and Sutherlands and found some blinds that Nancy liked.  The only problem is that the windows in the living room have a length of 88 inches, and that is not a standard length.  Now Nancy is going to have to decided if the wants to have them custom ordered or split the window in half leaving the very top portion unshaded to let more sunlight in the room.
• Our next stop was the cable company to schedule an appointment to have cable boxes installed in the house and have wireless internet installed.  Believe it or not that was a painless process, but it was a good thing Lance was there to answer the cable guys questions because Nancy would have been paying over $200 a month if he wasn't there to answer the questions.
• Nancy hired a handyman to do some final work around the house (hang up lighting fixtures and install the trim up above her cabinets).  Lance stayed around to make sure that everything went well with that  meeting and it was a good thing that he did as you will see below.
• When Lance got to Nancy's house in the morning, Nancy took him to the basement and showed him a  where some water was leaking from a pipe.  Lance is by no means a plumber (Julie can attest to that from the busted pipe), so he said to wait until the handyman showed up and let him look at it.  Lance didn't think that it was a big deal, but when the handyman looked at the pipe he noticed that for some reason the pipe was pretty much butted right against the ceiling.  This was a no-no, but made even worse when it was discovered that when they were stapling the padding down for the hardwood floor that two of the staples punctured the pipe which was causing the drip.  This was bad, so Lance called Julie and she gave him the name of a plumber who could come out that day and fix the problem.  An hour fifteen minutes later, the plumber fixed the problem and it ended up being 4 staples puncturing the pipe.  It was a good thing it was caught because if that pipe burst from the puncture, that would not have been good.

All in all it was quite a long day and it will only get longer until Nancy is fully moved in.