Did I mention that I love our front porch? It makes for lovely people watching. Well, we have finally finished furnishing it, so here is what it looks like now. Don’t you want to just drop by and relax in one of those inviting seats? If so, please do! Preferably when we are home…
Since there isn’t much else to report, I thought I’d report about where we bought these items and our various experiences with these vendors.
Patio chairs
The chairs themselves are from West Elm, which is a store whose design I love. Mike has been tolerant of my obsession thus far. After sitting in several types of patio chairs, wicker, rocking chairs, etc, he did agree that these were the most comfortable. I like their lightweight look.
West Elm Customer Service
When we purchased the chairs, we thought that they came with a back pillow since it was both listed and pictured on the website. However the chairs were delivered with no back pillows. There was a bit of a back and forth with West Elm where we discovered that the customer service representatives at West Elm really don’t have much information and that they aren’t able to actually speak to anyone in their furniture warehouse. The reps have to send them an email, which the furniture warehouse is supposed to respond to within 24 hours. Well, the furniture warehouse never does respond in 24 hours. After many phone calls and much confusion with West Elm, we decided to keep the chairs anyway and I bought cushions elsewhere. We had gotten a pretty good discount since West Elm does sometimes allow you to use a coupon on sale items (Pro Tip!) so we felt ok spending extra money. In a future post, I’ll tell you all about our current West Elm debacle which will likely make us swear them off forever! But we’ll see; it’s an ongoing situation.
Cushions
I wanted to extend a subtle (or maybe not-so-subtle) rope theme to the cushions in order to complement the chairs. The cushions are from a company called Ballard Designs whose catalog just showed up on our doorstep one day. These nautical lumbar cushions really fit the bill.
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Cons about Ballard: these cushions took 2 months to arrive! Apparently they were back-ordered which I only found out about after I called them to see what the heck was going on. They didn’t email me about the back-order nor was their any indication on their web page about it.
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Pros about Ballard: their customer service is pretty awesome. They have reps 24/7 and they answer nearly instantaneously. I had to call them because the cushions were delivered when we were out of town for a night. I got the UPS notification via email that they had been delivered but when we got back to the house, they were nowhere to be found. I immediately called Ballard about the cushions not showing up and they expedited shipping new cushions, no questions asked. They even gave me a discount for the inconvenience (which at the time I thought was UPS’s fault)! In the end, it turned out that our next door neighbor had kindly picked it up since they noticed we were out of town. They just forgot to mention it for a few days! So I called Ballard and they canceled the order, again no questions asked. So I do think I would order from them again, despite the long waiting period.
##Side table
This table is from Grandin Road, another company that I had never heard of until we got a catalog. I think they might be owned by the same parent company as Ballard Designs - some of their messaging is eerily similar.
Nothing interesting to report on them, except this table also took 2 months to show up, but that seems to be par for the course for these furniture places. Perhaps I have become too spoiled by Amazon Prime?
Asbestos Be Gone!
In other news, we no longer have asbestos! This removal really hurt ye ol’ wallet. It cost nearly $2000 to remove: taking 3 guys half a day to contain the area, clean everything, and then have a DC inspector sign off on their work. Pretty pricey but oh look how those pipes gleam!
Before
The asbestos is that white lining on the pipe.
During
The abestos containment zone! Very ET-esque.
After
(It really is gleaming, I swear!)