Over the past few weeks, we determined that we were going to get Behr paint from Home Depot. The idea is that we will paint most of the interior walls the week after my wife finishes her finals and before she starts working this summer, so that we can get rid of the awful mint green that permates the majority of the house. Consumer Reports had nice thing to say about the paint, and we found some paint chips that had the colors we were looking for and hung them on the wall.

Being as busy as we were, we had only managed to narrow down the selections but had not made any actual choices on paint yet when I went to Home Depot yesterday morning. I had a few tools I needed to get, and figured that I might as well wait until I could get a free light bulb. I happened to notice that Behr was running a promotion for a 25% rebate on paint. I came home, we chose our colors, we measured our walls, and we were out the door to get our paint. We were going to buy it in a week anyway, so this way we can get some of the money back in a few months.

Measuring how much paint we needed was a fun experience. What we did was basically measure each surface that was going to be painted for each color. We had one column that had the height and width that would be painted, and another column for the height and width of anything that would not be painted such as doors and windows. I then threw all of those numbers into a spreadsheet, had it figure out the square footage, and add and subtract all of the numbers for us.

The paint requirements for the house spreadsheet is pretty simple, and could easily be made more useful. However, this was a one-off thing so I just went quick and dirty. The amount of paint needed was off a little bit, because I assumed that one gallon of paint could cover 350 square feet of wall space. According to the guy at Home Depot, the stuff that we bought covers about 400 square feet per gallon.

If you are interested in downloading the spreadsheet, take a look and let me know if you find it useful. We wound up buying 5 gallons and 1 quart of paint, and 3 gallons of primer. Our kitchen will be yellow and orange, and the yellow will carry through the hallways and the living room. Two of the walls in the living room will be a darker yellow. Our bedroom will be a different green than is in there now. The dining room is going to be red.

The last time that I stopped in at Freihofer’s bakery outlet, I did not have the best experience. However, every other time that I am there I have had an average experience, and they have great prices on english muffins and bagels that I eat on a daily basis. Today, I had an experience there that more than makes up for the last time I went in.

Today when I went to the store, they had both english muffins and bagels on sale. When you can get both at or just over a dollar for a half dozen, it pays to stock up. When I got to the counter, I was chatting with the manager about the good price. I said something along the lines of how the last time I was in they were both on sale as well, which hadn’t happened before. Then I mentioned how I should have gotten my last batch for free, but I didn’t because the lady ringing me out had not been paying attention.

The store has a promotion where if a red dot appears on your receipt, whatever you are buying is free. She did not notice until after she had punched in my cash, so when I pointed it out her response was something along the lines of, “Well, I already punched in your cash, so the next person in line gets their food for free.”

When I spoke with the manager today, I was certainly complaining, but I did it in a joking way and not in any way trying to get free food out of him. He just said, “Tell you what, you can have the rest of this for free.” He had only rung up a couple of packs of bagels, so I thanked him and said that he didn’t have to do that and handed him my credit card. Of course, the amount was below what they accept credit for. I took a 5 dollar bill out, but he just decided to cancel the order and gave me all four bags of bagels and 3 packages of english muffins for free. His reasoning was that I was a good customer and he knew that I’d be back, so he did not lose much by giving them to me. Of course, I’d have been back even had I paid for all of them, and I offered to do so.

This rambling story just goes to show that some stores are willing to make good on their mistakes, even when you don’t require them to. I like that.

This weekend, I am finally getting a chance to insulate my attic. More on that next week. Today, I’d like to talk about the customer service that I received at Home Depot. The service that I received ran from great to awful, but not necessarily in that order.
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I have not yet purchased the insulation for my attic. It was raining too hard this weekend, and I am supposed to be tapering for a marathon, so I decided to wait for a few weeks before I purchased it. One of my concerns about buying a lot of insulation at once was that there was no way I would get it home in one trip. I have a pickup truck, but insulation can take up a lot of space (hence the point of having it) and a small Ranger just will not cut it. There is a solution, though!
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At the grocery store, you can save quite a bit of money on your deli meats in two ways. The best way is to just buy a full ham or turkey, cook it yourself, and then slice it. You get the most bang for your buck, but then you have a lot of food that will need to be eaten fairly quickly.

The better way is to get meat and cheese ends. Around here, deli meats usually cost around $8 per pound or so, but the meat and cheese ends cost only $2.99 per pound. Well, they did until today. Now they cost $3.49 per pound.
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Recently, Time Warner cable took over for Adelphia. They still have not got complete control, but that should come over the next three to six months. Football season started last night, so I had cable television installed yesterday afternoon. Last night, I watched the Miami and Pittsburgh game with what is somewhat less than the quality that I would have expected from digital cable. The tech who installed the cable checked the signal, which was plenty strong. However, once I actually tried watching the babble box I had to check to make sure that I was in fact using cable and not some rabbit ears.
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We went out to Office Depot this evening to see if they will make good on trying to keep us from buying a computer from them. The gentleman I spoke with at the local store was very nice and actually let us use the computer. It was still broken, however, and we did not want to spend $800 (after discount for a display model) on a broken computer.

With my wife going back to school, we are in the market for a new notebook computer. We do not want to spend much money, but are willing to above the budget if we could find a tablet PC so that she will have less danger of carpal tunnel. Office Depot had one that we were willing to buy, but they do not want to sell it to us. After trying on numerous occasions to give them our money, I have given up and will never purchase anything from Office Depot again unless their corporate office makes good on their inept store managers.
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Today was my day to do work around the house. As such, I had to run over to Home Depot today to pick up a few odds and ends. The parking lot was about half full. There were a couple of vans, half of a dozen cars, and pickup trucks. Yep, it’s Home Depot on a holiday in Maine! At a rough guess, I would say that there were about 120 pickup trucks in the lot.

Of course, one of the pickup trucks was mine…

I mentioned previously how we did not want to use Macy’s for our bridal registry. We wound up using Bed, Bath and Beyond and Home Depot instead. We have had nothing but positive experiences with Bed, Bath and Beyond.

When we went back to set up a registry, we had a short wait before somebody was available to help us Bed, Bath and Beyond. However, she let us know she’d be a few minutes and that she’d be right back, and once there she was very helpful and made sure that we had a good experience.
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