For once, a winter storm here in Northeast Ohio actually lived up to the hype. It snowed pretty much non-stop from Friday morning through Saturday night, and as you can see from the picture, we got dumped on pretty good.

I wasn't the nerd out in the front yard with the measuring stick, but it was almost up to my knees, and above the level of our front porch, so I'd say it's pretty close to two feet. Everything shut down yesterday including the airport, and yesterday evening they had a driving ban in effect here in Summit County. I haven't been out and about yet today, but it seems like things are pretty much back to normal, except for the huge piles of snow all over the place thanks to the NE Ohio snowplow army.

Now that I'm a homeowner, I find myself frequenting the home improvement stores just as often as I frequented malls when I was a teenager. Unfortunately, most of the things for sale here are a lot more expensive than the window shopping I mostly did at the malls back in the day. In the battle of the home improvement stores, I initially gravitated towards Home Depot since I have family that works there. But Home Depot has done it's best to turn me off.

When I was finalizing the purchase of my house, I picked out a washer & dryer, the only appliances the house did not come with, and purchased them 2 weeks before move-in day, and scheduled them to be delivered the day after I moved in (which was 2 weeks ago today). So come the day before move-in, the delivery company that Home Depot outsources their deliveries to, calls and says the washer & dryer are backordered and won't be available for another week and a half. So very reluctantly, I rescheduled the delivery for the next available Saturday, March 8th. So this morning they called to verify the delivery, so I thought I'd finally be able to catch up on my laundry this weekend. Well, this afternoon, on my drive home from work, I get a phone call from guess who, telling me they canceled all of their deliveries for tomorrow due to the snow storm forecast. So I would have to wait yet another week to do laundry with the appliances I had paid for a month ago.

I'm usually a pretty passive guy, but that was the last straw for me. So I got home, logged onto Lowe's website to see what they had to offer, and found I could actually get the same washer & dryer cheaper, and delivered the next day! So it wasn't a hard decision to make that I was going to go to Home Depot, cancel my order and swing by Lowe's and give them my money instead. Home Depot didn't try to talk me out of it, which is a little surprising. I would think they'd be trained to try to persuade a customer not to cancel a nearly $2000 order, but either they didn't care or no one ever told them they should.

So tomorrow morning, I anxiously be awaiting the delivery of my first washer & dryer. It has been a while since I've done laundry with halfway decent appliances that don't require me to feed quarters into them. But alas, if the "blizzard" they are forecasting lives up to the forecast (not very common around here, the bigger the hype, the smaller the "storm"), Lowe's actually delivers on Sundays too. Screw you Home Depot. I'm a Lowe's guy now.

Labels: house, retail