Wood and Steel
I stopped off in Navasota and paid for my steel....it will take about 5 days or so to cut and fold all the trim and I will have to rent a fork lift to unload their small "hotshot" truck at the other end....but the rental is all accounted for in the Master Plan. I will be checking in with my friends at the rental yard and just set up a day...
After checking in at MIL and FIL, I headed over to TOGR....The recent storms had knocked down a bunch of disease and drought weakened trees up at The Old Goat Ranch....I actually had to walk in to the barn and get a chain saw to clear a path down the driveway....more fence mending is in my future...but otherwise the Ranch was in pretty good shape...I turned on the water and power and went on into Town (with a big "T").
A while back a salesman at Home Depot had convinced me to open a Commercial Charge Account with them...and tho the 21.5% interest rate was not especially attractive, the promised Contractors Discount for orders over $1K was....I figured I would use the card and pay it off at the end of each month...and bank the savings...
I had already ordered the windows and doors for the shell....15 windows and 4 doors....nothing special, but more than they had in stock, so I had to wait for a shipment...no problem..."just put it on the card" I tells them...
BUT....even tho the items were regular stock, and not a special order, it seems the most I was going to get in the way of a discount was 10% off the retail price...
...I was expecting more like 20% after the salesmans sales pitch...
...but this was still a bit less than the other yards in the area charged, so I booked the order, tho I could just start to SMELL something.....the powerful and unmistakable odor of mendacity...
I should have seen the next one coming....
I had dropped off a lumber Take Off list at the Contractor Services desk...I had previously built an estimate, so I would know how much cash to move into my Building Account....got the numbers right off the Home Depot website...
A couple of days later when the nice folks sent me their bid by email, I found that they had priced many of the items on it, all stock lumber, at well OVER the posted retail prices....on another trip to Town (Big "T") I confronted the manager of the store regarding this bit of chicanery, and I was rewarded with....GET THIS....a 4% discount....a price that still left the total well above their own posted retail prices....
I cancelled the window/door order and went shopping elsewhere...I figured SOMEBODY somewhere wanted a $5k building materials order ....and would not play games to get it....
It turns out that I had been seduced by the bright lights of the Big Box stores and had overlooked a smaller, local option...
The folks at McCoys will be my first stop from now on...not only were their prices lower than the Big Box stores, their delivery charge was only $12 to deliver 30 miles from their Bryan store out to the Ranch....anyting from a flatbed to a 40' semi with a forklift...same price...
There is an arrogance in the Big Box stores that I had not anticipated....for all the advertising hoopla, their prices and delivery charges are higher, and tho they may have heaps of home decor items, good old McCoys whipped their butts on the basics....and McCoys is a Texas-based company...keeping money circulating locally is not to be overlooked these days...
Another issue that cropped up was wood treatments....it seems that, to keep prices down, all of the lumber yards, including McCoys, stock CCA treated poles and lumber in a "Ground Contact" treatment concentration...that works out to .40 lbs per cubic foot of wood where my engineering guideline demands a .60 treatment....which is rated for "Direct Burial" or "Fresh Water Contact"....
To get that higher concentration, all the yards have to order the poles....so I decided to just go to a specialist yard in Houston for that...
"Bayou City Lumber" down on Telephone Road has been around for a long time, and as far as they are concerned, a small order like mine gets the same treatment as the Big Boys...they work directly with the Osmocote treatment plant in Houston, and ordering my poles took a whole two days to get them from the the treating kettle in the plant to the yard...and their prices are lower than the Big Box stores as well...
The heavier treatment, BTW, only added $4 to the cost of a 20' 6x6 pole...
The customer service there was super...since my trailer would not handle the entire load in one pile, they were happy to split the load up in two and store it in their yard for me....no extra charge...
Finding folks like them surviving on slim margins by virtue of their Customer Service in the current climate of "self serve" building supply stores is like finding a spring of sweet water in the desert...I will go out of my way to patronize them...
I made a quick round trip back to the Coast...I needed to load up more tools and supplies and pick up my trailer, which was in the shop for service...and spending an evening or two with Precious Bride has a certain attraction as well...
When my trailer was finished, sporting a nice new set of tires and brakes, I loaded up my tools and stopped off at the pole yard...my order was waiting for me...fresh and wet and SOME kind of heavy...the yard crew had me loaded in no time at all and just like that, with half a house-full of poles rocking along behind me...I headed North...
T
