When Murphy's Law meet Angie's List
Oct. 10th, 2006 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
naomikritzerWe needed new gutters and downspouts. We also needed the big elm tree in our back yard trimmed. (Yes, if anyone's wondering, it's been treated with the fungicide to protect it from Dutch Elm disease.) We wanted to get the new gutters ASAP (the old gutters were leaking in places, and it usually rains a lot in the fall) and we wanted to get the tree trimmed once it was late enough to do so (elm trees are usually trimmed in fall or winter).
I called around contractors, got bids, and then called back an arborist and a gutter place to schedule.
Both the arborist and gutter place had excellent reviews on Angie's List, and had great prices, but were a little slow at returning phone calls.
Last week, I left a message for the arborist, and mentioned that I needed to know when she'd be coming because we were having the gutters replaced. Yesterday, I left a message for the gutter place, saying that I knew they were coming soon, but I needed to know when, because I was also trying to schedule tree trimmers. The arborist called yesterday afternoon to confirm what I wanted to have done, but still didn't schedule a specific time because my neighbor also wanted something done, and hadn't had a chance to talk to her yet.
This morning, my phone rang at about 8 a.m. It was the gutter place, wanting to know if today would be an okay day to come out and replace all our gutters. I hadn't heard anything from the arborist about coming today, so I said sure -- it should be fine. The gutter installers arrived at 9:30.
The tree trimmers (yeah, you saw this one coming) arrived at 9:45.
The good news is, by 5 p.m., I had trimmed trees and new gutters. But, good grief. As one of the gutter installers commented, "usually people have the opposite problem!"
(There are household jobs that could be done simultaneously. But gutter replacement and tree trimming are a particularly bad combination. Not that anyone wants to be in your yard while tree branches are crashing to the ground around them.)
It was an amazingly frenetic day. To top it off, I made rock cornish game hens for dinner tonight; I'd never tried to roast these before. These are the little birds that look and taste like miniature chickens. They're actually really cheap (particularly at Aldi, where they sell for something like $1.60 each) and I thought the girls would think it was cool to get an individual bird. The hens turned out well and the girls did think it was neat. But, it was also much more time-consuming to get them ready to go into the oven than I had expected. And this was definitely a day that (considering everything else) I should have made spaghetti or something similarly non-labor-intensive. (We plan the menu on Saturday or Sunday, and if my calendar had said "AM: tree trimmer. PM: gutter replacement," I would not have said, "okay! That's the day I'm going to try roasting rock cornish game hens!" I would have said, "Hmmm. Maybe ham and bean soup in the crock pot.")
I called around contractors, got bids, and then called back an arborist and a gutter place to schedule.
Both the arborist and gutter place had excellent reviews on Angie's List, and had great prices, but were a little slow at returning phone calls.
Last week, I left a message for the arborist, and mentioned that I needed to know when she'd be coming because we were having the gutters replaced. Yesterday, I left a message for the gutter place, saying that I knew they were coming soon, but I needed to know when, because I was also trying to schedule tree trimmers. The arborist called yesterday afternoon to confirm what I wanted to have done, but still didn't schedule a specific time because my neighbor also wanted something done, and hadn't had a chance to talk to her yet.
This morning, my phone rang at about 8 a.m. It was the gutter place, wanting to know if today would be an okay day to come out and replace all our gutters. I hadn't heard anything from the arborist about coming today, so I said sure -- it should be fine. The gutter installers arrived at 9:30.
The tree trimmers (yeah, you saw this one coming) arrived at 9:45.
The good news is, by 5 p.m., I had trimmed trees and new gutters. But, good grief. As one of the gutter installers commented, "usually people have the opposite problem!"
(There are household jobs that could be done simultaneously. But gutter replacement and tree trimming are a particularly bad combination. Not that anyone wants to be in your yard while tree branches are crashing to the ground around them.)
It was an amazingly frenetic day. To top it off, I made rock cornish game hens for dinner tonight; I'd never tried to roast these before. These are the little birds that look and taste like miniature chickens. They're actually really cheap (particularly at Aldi, where they sell for something like $1.60 each) and I thought the girls would think it was cool to get an individual bird. The hens turned out well and the girls did think it was neat. But, it was also much more time-consuming to get them ready to go into the oven than I had expected. And this was definitely a day that (considering everything else) I should have made spaghetti or something similarly non-labor-intensive. (We plan the menu on Saturday or Sunday, and if my calendar had said "AM: tree trimmer. PM: gutter replacement," I would not have said, "okay! That's the day I'm going to try roasting rock cornish game hens!" I would have said, "Hmmm. Maybe ham and bean soup in the crock pot.")
