Bargain Shopping and Home Improvement
My decision to travel out to Hampshire, a 45 minute drive from my house, turned out to be a good one. In search of a toolbench for the garage, I had scoped this craigslist add during breakfast this morning. The bench wouldn’t fit in the car, so I couldn’t buy it. There was, however, a microwave for sale. A GE Profile Spacemaker.
The homeowner wanted to get rid of things. So she offered it to me for 5 bucks! So I took it home. This proving law number 6:
Wait long enough, and you won’t have to do nasty job X.
In this case, nasty job X was cleaning the range hood in the kitchen of it’s greasy load. Instead, I just took it out today.
Problem 1 arose from the obvious: Wirey connection does not play well with power plug. It involved about 7 bucks in purchase from the home center. I’ll get the box wired up tomorrow.
Problem 2: The microwave requires a set of mounting brackets. Kudos to GE for having their care line open 24 7 to help customers find and buy the parts they need for 8 year old microwave hardwaare.
The additional parts will set me back about 60 bucks. Yes, that hurts, but this is a good microwave. A good, 6 year old microwave. I hope.
I ended up finding an open box workbench at ALDI, clearance priced at 59.99 (a bargain in its own right), FURTHER reduced to 29.99!
We tried getting the thing into my car, and failed miserably (of course, not before carving a hunk of rubber out of my poor back seat’s doorframe.
I ended up taking the thing apart into 7 pieces, right in front of ALDI. For some reason, everyone walking into the store or leaving the store felt compelled to share some point or pearl of wisdom on the matter. Most popular was the open-ended question “Didn’t fit, huh?”
Followed closely by the oft slipping inner monologue’s ”What’s this guy up to?”
My favorite line was “Shit, I thought this was a grocery store!” Of course, the guy had to ruin my goodwill toward him by ashing his cigarette onto the damn box, which was more like a L shaped form of door and left wall.
Have you seen the dolly’s they have at Aldi? They’re goofy, complex, and awesome. They’ve got 4 sets of wheels that you can progressively rock back to until the final, ground-kissing hunchback angle.
I still love Aldi. Despite the fact that my Garden salad bags have gone up to 99 cents.
They’re remodeling the store next week. I’m excited - aren’t you? I’m looking forward to the fresh, updated look in my local Aldi store that will be completed in hours outside of normal peak shopping hours.
If you don’t hear from me, it’s probably because I forgot to turn off the electricity before playing with the wires dangling from where the range hood was.
-Jimmy