Day: November 12, 2009

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Home Depot-made Decisions

I went to Home Depot tonight to get the thingamabob that I’m missing to connect my dishwasher to the faucet. I don’t even want to admit where I put the dishwasher. 🙂 As I suspected, the missing part is not ‘common’, as the seller told me it was. But the price I paid was worth the finagling that will be necessary to hook up the appliance. The Home Depot plumbing helper told me to come back with the part I’m trying to hook up to the faucet seeing as the pics weren’t enough (he was impressed that I brought pictures!). The dishwasher has two hoses that screw into this part I’ll be bringing in, so the thingamabob might end up replacing the part altogether. Home Depot Guy and I are looking forward to MacGyvering a solution together. 🙂

Next, I went to flooring to ogle the Allure once more and gasped when I saw a new-old option. Turns out that Traffic Master got a bad batch of my third choice for the new floors. The colour’s apparently off, but it looks great to me. They really want to get through that batch and are selling the boxes for 36$ each. Regular price 56$. And I might need 10 boxes to do the rig end to end, for a total potential savings of 200$ by going with the flooring I like rather than the one I love! I checked with Home Depot and the price will stay until the entire batch is liquidated, and there could be millions of boxes of the stuff across North America. So, even if I were to buy only two or three boxes at a time, budget permitting, the price is guaranteed for a long time, and if the Home Depot here runs out they can get me some from another store.

Seeing as I have four days off ahead of me, I am crunching the numbers to see if I can afford the three boxes it’ll take for me to do the front room. Once the new floor’s in, I’ll be able to get my counter extension in and do a few other cheap projects. My only concern is that the flooring I’m considering is not going to look good with the current cabinetry, so I’m wondering if I’ll be able to live with the mismatch until I end up painting. Most likely yes. 🙂

Getting the front room ready for new flooring is going to be a project unto itself. It involves taking the dinette apart completely, including sawing through a steel seatbelt frame, as well as sawing through the bolts holding the two bucket chairs in place. And, of course, I’ll need to pull up the hardwood flooring in the kitchen. So, this will be a much bigger project than it was the first time around, but I look forward to having unified, easy-to-maintain flooring from one end of the RV to the other, as well as no thresholds to bang my toes on.

So, there you have it. The renos I’m embarking on aim to turn a blah RV into a cute little cottage on wheels. Let’s see how I do. 😀

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Pay Day Surprise

My first pay day at the gas station is tomorrow, so I was given my pay stub today seeing as I’m going to be off the next four days. I knew that the cheque would be more generous than I had calculated because I no longer need to have extra money taken off to pay to Revenue Quebec (whee!), but the amount seemed really off. So, I looked at the hourly rate and discovered, to my great pleasure, that I’m being paid a dollar more an hour than I had been told at hiring!

A dollar more an hour might not sound like much, but it’s significant. At a 24 hour part-time schedule (which is what I’ve been having so far) paid at minimum wage I could not meet my fixed expenses. At nine dollars an hour I can. If I get up to 40 hours a week, then I’ll be able to live. It won’t be enough for the other things I need to be saving up for, spring travel and renos, but it would be enough to live comfortably for the winter and to travel. So, a dollar more an hour is extremely significant and I’m grateful. There was also a nice note on the pay stub from the owner.

Today is the start of a 4-day weekend that will end with a brutal 6AM start time next week. I had made a note to myself to come home with Doritos seeing as Croft and Norma left me tons of salsa, cheese, and refried beans, so celebratory nachos were in order. Well, ‘The Chip Guy’ came in today and pulled the out dated (still edible, but too old to sell) product, which we are allowed to take home. I scored four huge bags of Cool Ranch Doritos, more than enough to get me through all that salsa, cheese, and refried beans over the next few months. As Croft would say, life is good!

My happy mood was not spoiled by the fact that the auditor came in today. He’s the guy who goes around nitpicking everything and who gave me grief for a leaf on the floor. *rolls eyes*

Next week, I have two solo eight hour closing shifts to do!

It’s amazing what a difference nine days make.