It’s Not Just Cabinets

Helpful PSA for all you would-be home renovation folks out there. I went to order my new windows and doors for the (hoped-for) kitchen remodel that will be coming in late September. We don’t need them for 7 or 8 weeks, so that felt like it should be plenty of time. For the doors, it didn’t appear to be. For the windows? The first brand I wanted to get was going to take a while to get here. How long?

20 weeks. That’s a 2 with a 0 after it. Five months. 140 days. We’re talking, they’d be here in January.

Perhaps that’s not really a surprise for some of you. Maybe it shouldn’t be for me, either. The pandemic has caused all sorts of chaos in all sorts of different areas. I can definitely understand why some people would like to pretend it’s no longer “a thing.” I would love to get back to the point we used to be at, where I could get practically anything I wanted, whenever I wanted it.

(ASIDE: Perhaps this can also be a good reminder that there’s a cost for that “whatever/whenever” luxury. It relies on many different people being available, hard at work to keep all the different cogs that run that machine going. I’ve reflected multiple times how we’ve taken prices and products for granted. When the first cell phones came out in 1984, they cost over $10,000 in today’s dollars. True, some of that price has gone down because technology has advanced in leaps and bounds. But then again, the cell phones then didn’t do anything like what the smart phones do now.

Cheap technology is possible because of cheap labor. There’s been no small amount of debate around what “essential services” really means today. If we value having readily available goods and services, it’s important to remind ourselves that those are a luxury, not a right. RANT OVER)

In any case, the good news is that they had other windows that will work fine, and they’ll be here in only 8 weeks, which should be in time for the job to get done. But I’m glad I ordered them now, and didn’t wait until the end of the month, like I was thinking would be sufficient. I wonder what other pleasant surprises this renovation has in store . . .

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