How Hard Can It Be?

Posted By on 10th July 2016

How hard can it be to buy a set of wooden doors for a garden shed?
This is how it should work.

Choose style of doors; measure hole carefully; find a supplier on EBay, with good ‘feedback’ who will make bespoke doors for a good price; pay good price; wait the 2 weeks specified for them to be made; await delivery; get Adrian to fit them. Er that’s it. Simple.

Well it was simple until the ‘delivery’ bit.

On Wednesday, exactly as promised, the doors were to be delivered by a well known UK carrier, but in the afternoon we received a message saying that our order, which consisted of 4 packages, would be delayed as one package had been put on the wrong van and sent to somewhere like Stockton or Stockport.

Annoying, but at least we were being kept ‘in the loop’ and as we know mistakes can happen to the best of us, so no harm done. We were assured all 4 bits of our order would be with us on Thursday.

By 4pm on Thursday nothing had arrived, despite the fact that at 3.30pm we had been told ‘he’ was in our area and would be ringing for directions.
So I rang the carrier.

To cut a long story short, despite the fact that all interested parties (EBay, PayPal, the supplier and the carrier) had our full postal address, post code and phone number, somewhere in the process my EBay user name had been thrown into the mix creating a completely fictitious address. In short he couldn’t find us. Why didn’t he ring for directions as promised, who knows?

I was assured that this confusion had now been rectified and that I would receive a call back to confirm when delivery would take place. Needless to say the call back never came, so on Friday morning I rang again. I was assured that all items were on the van for delivery to the correct address.

By 3pm nothing had arrived, so once more I rang the carrier and was told ‘he’ would be with us no later than 3.30pm. I stood by the phone in case directions were needed.

At 3.25pm I saw the delivery van in question drive passed the house and down into the village. Under normal circumstances it would be my job to make chase, but as I have a bad back it was Peter who set off down the road in search of the shed doors. (I’ve spent the last 6 months working like a dog and manage to pull a muscle right at the end of the process, getting out of the bath!)

I stayed by the phone, looking out of the widow. After what seemed like an age the van pulled up and Peter hopped out of the passenger door. At last we had our shed doors. The ‘swallow curtain’ has been successful and is OK as far as it goes, but is beginning to loose it’s charm.

Sadly our joy was short lived.

Although the frame is the right size for the carefully measured hole, the doors are not, being both too wide and too short.

After some head scratching we concluded that the reason for this was probably because the ‘width’ and ‘height’ measurements had been transposed, in other words they would have fit perfectly if they were hung sideways!

It’s at this point that I usually write ‘to be continued – – – – ‘ and so it will be, so watch this space.

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