The pavilion deck got off to an island time start. I prefer to use the local home improvement store, but this was a complicated order and I needed to see what materials were actually available and in stock, so it seemed to make the most sense to use a national chain that had online ordering. The local outfit has no online inventory or ordering. You have to engage in a frustrating, difficult, error-prone telephone ordering system… and I loathe telephones.
The ordering went well. There was a wait for the order to be delivered, but it finally came and the delivery driver was great. But there were two big parts of the order that were missing, one essential. None of the many calls, texts, and emails they sent about my delivery window mentioned this, and it was even hard to figure out from the website that it was a backorder and not a mistake. After all, I’d specifically ordered only things that claimed to be in-stock and available for immediate delivery.
Some weeks later, while I was traveling on the mainland, I got a text one night saying the delivery — the complete delivery — was coming in the morning. Arrgh. Fortunately, HA was at the compound and was able to receive the items. Except. The beams still weren’t in the order. The store then called to say they had talked to me the night before (nope, no missed phone calls, no voicemails, no texts, no emails) and told me the delivery was incomplete. They scheduled another date about a month out to finish the order.
I got another last-minute text at night saying my delivery window was the next day, surprising because they promised they’d call me when the stock came in, but no truck ever came. We tried calling but we had to go through a deep voice jail only to end up at a phone that rang and rang and was never answered. The web site still said that the order was scheduled to be delivered two days ago.
Then I got a notice from my credit card company that I had been issued a refund. So, after being promised that they had stock, and receiving a partial delivery twice (without warning), I had now waited three months and they just canceled the order for a critical component without ever notifying me. To date, four months now, they have never contacted me about the order.
I was driving through the city the other day and just stopped in at the local home improvement store and was able to score the beams, so construction could finally begin.
—2p
addendum 20250718@14:10
With the help of the Hired Hand, construction of the deck is proceeding at lightning speed.
