Appliances and my new freiend, Google Shopper

It occurred to me that lost in all the activity lately has been the issues revolving around the appliances. It had been a forgotten issue for quite a while because we had picked them out quite a while back. In fact, it was probably one of the first decision points we made and ended up be a sign of things to come in terms of the time spent trying to make that decision.

Well, several months after making those decisions, it came time to put everything on order. Except, whoops...we had those pesky cost issues again. It seems that when MOC quoted out the appliances to include in the the contract, no one included sales tax. Well, ~7% on thousands of dollars adds up to a big enough number, especially when one is trying to not spend anymore than necessary.

I expressed my displeasure and MOC clearly knowing that they made a mistake came back with an offer of something like splitting the additional cost 50/50. I'd been thinking about this for a couple days and after doing some searches online (hello Google), I was getting pretty confident that I could get the appliances myself and actually do better than the original quote price.

So, off I went. Doing Google product search after Google product search, I got my list. I found all our appliances at several different places for a price that put money back in our pocket. Now, I'm sure you could ask if the savings was really worth my time, but in the grand scheme of time spent on the project, it really wasn't that big of a deal. I suppose I could have called a couple places and negotiated a discount by placing all this through one place, but isn't that what MOC did (through Warners Stallion)?

Anyway, I placed my orders. I created a spreadsheet with vendors, order numbers and as they came in, tracking numbers. Things were going along quite well. Kathleen was even very supportive of accepting deliveries. The fridge came, as did the rangetop. Then the washer and dryer pedestals. Next was the dryer, which is where things got interesting. It arrived damaged, although no one discovered it until opening the box the next day.



I got a little worried at this point, especially after discovering a sticker saying something to the affect of "you open it, you own it". Well, before I could even worry much, Kathleen had placed a call to the carrier, who then contacted Abe's of Maine (where I ordered it from) and got everything going. They asked for pictures, like the above, and said everything would be taken care. Whew!

We've got the rest of the appliances arriving next Thursday and fingers crossed that things go smoothly. Hopefully the next update on appliances will be something along the lines of "they're installed and they look great".