After years of wanting to take the plunge, hubby and I had the space above our garage finished off into a playroom and bathroom. (This was before I started blogging, otherwise you would be intimately familiar with the ups and downs of this project). It was nearly impossible to find a builder to take the "small job". (It seems as if tens of thousands of dollars is only big to hubby and me!). Anyway, we went with a guy who happens to live down the road, and who got good reviews from another neighbor for whom he did some substantial work. Her only ding was that he wasn't great about coming back at the very end for those piddling little problems that always seem to crop up.

When they were setting up the room, we asked for a phone line to be installed. When we recently tried out the jack (a year later) it didn't work. We had the Verizon guy come, and he said that the line doesn't go anywhere. He tried looking in our garage and basement and couldn't find the line anywhere. So it cost me $91 to have him come out and tell me this, and now I'm left with two options. One call the builder and have him fix it, or two, call Verizon back and have them reinstall the jack, at what he estimated would cost about $175. I'm doubtful that the builder will take care of it. First of all, it's been over a year since it's been installed, second, he hasn't taken care of one other (more minor) issue that's needed to be fixed since December. I'm also not thrilled about spending another $175 to have Verizon fix it. And in either case, they'll be ripping up my brand new carpet and drilling holes in my new walls to fix it.

We can get by without having a phone up there, but we need the phone line for the DVR (TIVO), which we just got for that room. I'm not sure if it needs to be constantly hooked up to the phone line, or only hooked up when it's downloading whatever information it needs. If it's an intermittent thing, we can look into getting a 50-foot phone line and just connecting it to a jack in a different room. Obviously, this isn't a good solution if it needs to be hooked up all the time. How frustrating, especially when we're still paying off the HELOC associated with this "improvement".

Other than this major headache, things have been quiet. I broke down yesterday and turned on the AC. The house was 80 and humid. It went on around 8:00 last night and off this morning when I left for work. I'm not sure what the forecast is, but I'll try to keep it off. I also need to go to ShopRite at some point this week. I read that they're doing triple coupons this week in order to match a competitor, and I have a bunch of coupons to use that will get me things free, nearly free, or at a really good price. Hopefully I'll get there tonight.