OPERATION: Blinds

Okay, so I apologize. I apologize for not posting in 4 days. I know my loyal readers have been refreshing this page non-stop for the last 3 days praying for a new posting. Again I apologize. But as you know from my last posting, I was on hiatus from my strenuous Army training to be with my family for the weekend. Now, I know that is not reason enough to neglect my fans, but for some reason my wife doesn't share my sense of reasoning. I paid $260 to go home, and if I would have spent 15-30 minutes writing a BLOG post, my wife would have thought that was $10 of wasted cash!! So, you can thank her for my neglect.

BUT, it was worth it. And I will spare you the gruesome details.

However, I did get to spend some of my time doing some improvements on our new house, "home improvements," if you will. Oh, the joys!! When we bought our house we decided to save some money by putting in our own blinds. Which for the 10 windows and one sliding-glass door, has turned into a 3 month project!! Granted, part of that is due to the fact that I haven't really been home to do it, but really. Now, I've stated before that I can be lazy at times, but, trust me, that has absolutely nothing to do with why this project has taken so long.

We started off by buying 6 blinds for 6 windows. (Funny how the numbers work out.) Anyway, we would have bought enough for all the windows, however, the style we bought was only carried in one of the handful of Lowe's stores in the Boise area. Unbeknownst to us, they were a clearance item that was not going to be restocked. For sake of time and interest, I am going to summarize the story up until this last weekend. 2 blinds--ALL DAY. Broken drill bit. Tight places. Wrong tools. Stripped threads. Cheap tools. 2 more blinds--ALL EVENING (the next weekend). Sawdust in eyes. Another broken drill bit. Sears run. Watching baby. Kids helping. Wife hovering. 2 more blinds--another ALL EVENING (a different weekend). Baby sleeping. Quiet installation. Baby waking. Baby crying. Daddy holding baby while mommy cooks dinner. More sawdust, more stripped threads, more cheap tools, luckily no broken bits. RESULTS: 6 of 10 blinds installed.

Okay, last weekend. We go to Lowe's (again) hoping to find the long lost shipment of clearance blinds (you know, the ones that were on clearance 3 months earlier). We spend all morning debating which blinds would be acceptable, and we decided to get the vertical blinds for our sliding-glass door. Oh, we also checked prices on a custom blind for my office. So, we get 3 blinds and one vertical blind. As I am loading these into my cart, I see a sign "Guaranteed Blind Installation: $70." No way am I going to pay $70 to do a job I can do myself.

We get home and I begin. Well, I at least opened the box and got the pieces out. I couldn't really start because the battery on my drill/screwdriver was dead and I had to wait for the charge. Once charged, I begin. So I pre-drill the holes, only to find that I need to use the anchors to mount the brackets, which, according to the de-structions, requires pre-drilled holes with a 7/32" drill bit. THE ONLY SIZE BIT I DIDN'T HAVE. Back to Lowe's. I buy the bit and head back to the house. I drill the holes and insert the anchors, which were pieces of crap and just stripped the holes making them even bigger and didn't "anchor" anything!! So, it was back to Lowe's to buy higher quality anchors to fit in the now bigger holes. At this point, $70 seemed to be a fairly reasonable price. The 3 hours of wasted time driving back and forth, the gas it cost to go back and forth, the additional money spent in tools and pieces, well worth $70 in my opinion.

Fortunately, things went a little smoother after that. However, because of the day full of setbacks, my accomplishments were limited to the one set of vertical blinds and 1 set of blinds in the kitchen. Still, "OPERATION: Blinds" is still unaccomplished. 3 blinds left.