Home Show

There was a Home & Garden Show at the Expo Center at the end of February. We were leaving for a Disneyland vacation in a couple of days, but made time to go out to the show and look around. We were armed with discount coupons for our admission tickets, but a vendor walking in at the same time as us handed us free tickets!

Once instead, we started at one end and worked our way through the show, stopping to talk to vendors about windows, roofs, cabinets, bathroom remodels, flooring, etc. You name it, there was someone there selling it. We made several appointments for people to come out and give us estimates for windows. We also signed up with many other vendors for free estimates, asking them to please call after mid-March. We didn't want our answering machine filled up with calls while we were on vacation. Very few of the vendors heeded our request. We returned with multiple calls from several vendors. I immediately took them out of the running, since they couldn't seem to follow a simple request.

While we learned a lot about the options that were available, it was also a little discouraging. Many of the vendors seemed to over-inflate their competitors pricing in attempt to make their own products seem more reasonable.

At the end of a long afternoon, we returned home with bags full of brochures and information and dreading the process of meeting with all these people and listening to their sales pitches. Unfortunately, we figured this was the only way to get things done.