More Contractors... and car dealers...

This morning a representative from Julius H. Gross Painters came by the house at 8:30 on the dot to give us an estimate for interior trim painting... we got a quote from the folks at Julius' establishment a few years ago for roughly $5250.00. We're hoping that since we've replaced the bulk of the windows since then (meaning, no need to paint all of the window grills) the price will have come down. At the end of the day, I'm expecting it will come in at $5200.

Next on the schedule was to be Maryanne Applegate from Applegate woodfloors. We had originally arranged for Ms. Applegate to come by the house last week at 7:30am but she was a no show. We gave her a second chance (noting that she made no effort to reschedule with us)... today she was supposed to arrive between 10:30am and 11:00am. We joked that we would be annoying and call her by varying names such as Appleseed, Appletree, Peachtree, etc., etc. but unfortunately we didn't get the chance. Again, a no show. Not even a call! So much for customer service!

ps. on another front, today we went looking at cars... visiting the BMW dealer in Flemington was good because they had a ton of different models on the showroom floor and no one even once approached us to ask if we needed assistance... (normally that would be offputting, but we generally don't like to talk to people and since we had no intention of actually making a purchase from this particular dealership, being able to sit in all of the cars and critique them unbothered by a sales associate was a good thing).... next I convinced the Husband to go across the street to the Porsche dealer since I had read in last week's NY Times that the Cayenne now comes in 3 price points... The only problem with this scenario is that the Porsche dealer in Flemington is also an Audi and a VW dealer and I guess the salesmen there are more informed about those other brands because we walk in to the showroom and they have only 2 Porsche (no Cayenne) on display and a slew of random VW's... One of the salesmen approaches us and it actually appeared that I knew more about the Cayenne than he did. I made the mistake of starting off by saying "I saw in the New York Times..." and then things went downhill from there. He tells us that he may have "one" new one outside but that it's being testdriven. We go outside and there are actually 3 in the lot-- one at each of the three price points! I guess they must not sell many of those in Flemington...