Adventures in Home Improvement Warehouse Shopping.

Today Shannon and I hopped into Matt's new truck and set off on a mission to buy a sink and toilet. I've never driven the truck into the city so I was very nervous.

Stop 1: Target
Made it there in one piece and I love riding above the crowd rather than below everyone in the civic. We went perimeter perusing - Shan found a TP holder for $2.50 - woot! I printed off some pictures of the world's cutest 1 year old and picked up some new method aroma pills in citrus cilantro. They make the house smell so clean, I love it! Actually I love pretty much anything method makes, good for the environment and it smells good. Check it out. www.methodhome.comStop 2: Home Depot

I knew I wanted to pick up the sink today and thought I was going to buy the toilet and I wanted to use my free $50 gift card I got for test driving a Toyota Tundra. Adventure #1 finding a cart. Apparently they horde the big flat bed carts and you have to hunt for them.

off, they wouldn't match it. So the mean lady left us and we went to look at toilets. I agonized over which to buy. Shh...don't tell, but I actually looked at reviews of the two that I liked online to make sure they flushed well. I decided not to buy it now and went off in search of the rest of the list Matt gave us, which included 12 - 10' sections of pvc conduit and 2 giant bags of cement. So we hunted down the cement - I used my brawn to heave the 94 pound bags onto our cart (no strong men around at that point) then went off in search of conduit. Found a cute sales boy whoWe finally hunted down the cart and headed back to the fixture section. I found the sink I wanted (see picture a few posts down) and the base was on sale! Sweet - I didn't have to make them price match Lowes. But the sink was $20 more than Lowes and because one number was pointed us in the rightish direction and we piled the conduit on. The question became how do we maneuver the cart because I decided that I did want to buy the toilet after all. So I straddled the 4' pipe overhang and the handle end. Sure straddle the pipe and 2 men come running over asking if I needed help. I think they had pipe envy, because mine definitely won :) They asked what we were building...A dollhouse? Um, no buddy. I'm old, building a house, that's why I'm carting around cement and piping. Anyway he let me leave my cart with him while we went on another hunt for gold...er a flat cart. Found one, and had one of our pipe envy guys call ahead to have someone lift my potty.

Uh oh. It's the same lady who got annoyed when I wanted her to price match for me. Um, I just had a strong man, why can't he do the lifting? Whatever. I make up my mind to get the one with better reviews and she loads it onto my cart. Just as she got it loaded on, she noticed a scratch on the bowl. She made to take it off and get another...so I asked if I could have a discount if I took it! She rolled her eyes at me but I scored 10% off! Woot.



Made it to the checkout and even managed to back the truck to the loading area without hitting anything (score!) and helped a little kid load the truck. Find that the conduit does not fit in the truck bed and I didn't bring the straps. Crap. Good thing I had the Cheese with me, who suggested opening the back window and shoving them through. Crisis averted.

Stop 3: Lowes

I left Shannon in the car to guard my pooper while I ran in to grab the sink basin. I had to wait for a guy to pick it up for me (holy heavy batman!) and I ran up front. Then I felt the ominous buzzing in my pocket, it was Shannon, someone had hit the truck! Oh crap, Matt's going to kill me. Sounds like someone pulled in too close and bumped it, gave Shannon quite the shock, but everything was fine. Phew. Get off the phone and realize that hey! I'll be Lowes will match HD's price on the base. So I went back and had the guy load on the base. Go back up front to find that yeppers, they can price match, so I saved another 10%.

Stop 4. Home Depot
Get back into the truck and decide that since we're already in town, we should go to HD to return the sink base. Drive over there, figure out which base came from them, and leave Shan to guard the goods again. Wait 10 minutes for someone to take care of the guy in front of me, and return the sink that I bought there 45 minutes ago. I should have told the girl that lowes had it cheaper to see if they would undercut themselves. Oh well not that smart.

Finally made it home 4 hours after I left but I have bathroom fixtures that I love. Life is good.