July 19 - A sour day

BTW, a friend who lives on the north side of Sundown a couple of miles from us recorded a high temperature yesterday of 111! He found that hard to believe until his neighbor concurred that he also topped out at 111. Here is a pic of his thermometer in the shade on his deck showing 109.

Some of us heard the stories about the 100 degree temps and the drought of 1936 from our parents. Mom and dad mentioned it several times when I was growing up. Now, we are experiencing much of the same conditions and by the time this summer ends, too many of us will have similar stories to share with our descendants.

I'm sad to report that not much can happen on the house now until the Eagle windows show up. As it stands now, the windows will be delivered on site on Monday, July 30. The regional rep for Andersen/Eagle will be here that day to instruct Tom and his crew on proper window installation as recommended by Eagle.

It turns out that our window order screw up was not Eagle's fault. It was Lockridge that allowed our order to sit in limbo and not get built on time. Lockridge thought the order was accepted but it wasn't. Chock it up to inexperience using Eagle's online order system and then not following up in a timely manner to ensure the order was properly received.

Another home that was built on Lake Sundown this spring had a nasty window problem, too. I doubt that it involved either Lockridge or Eagle. The contractor received the sliding windows that were ordered and installed all of them. But they found out later that the homeowner wanted double-hungs. All the windows had to be reordered and swapped out weeks later. I pray that our windows arrive without any issues. They had better be right!

And here's our bad news for today......
Today, Lockridge delivered the front entry door and two other exterior doors. Upon inspection of the front door we discovered that it is not what we thought it would be. After a visit to the lumber yard, the door will be shipped back to the door company next Tuesday for modification within a couple of days.

Boy, am I learning some lessons the hard way these days. It's not our fault that the door was wrong. But Lockridge is saying that it's exactly what we agreed to order (about three months ago). I don't believe them. If we wanted to get nasty about this we would win. They have nothing to prove that we signed off on this door before it was ordered. But rather than getting into nasty argument with them about this, I'm trying to make the best of it. Possibly getting stuck with a door that would be hard to sell and/or waiting for weeks for another new custom door is not a good option. We need to get this house enclosed.

We're not happy right now but somehow we'll make lemonade out of all these lemons.

Since not much work can be done on the house until July 30, we have encouraged the heating/cooling contractor to get his drilling crew here next week to drill the wells for our geothermal system. They sub-contract this work to a company called Geostem. I've already paid for 50% of the job and they've known for a couple of weeks that they could do the drilling any time. Next week would be a good week to get that out of the way. Let's see if they can come through.