what, you mean you didn't want orange curtain bars?

ok, so the challenges of furnishing the apartment continue. yesterday our curtain lady and her helper arrived at the condo to install the curtains. they came by taxi with the 9 foot curtain bars hanging vertically out the window. we had asked for brown colored bars that matched some accents on the curtains. well, she showed up with ORANGE colored bars. Veronica and I look at them, shake our heads wondering how she could have picked that color, and seriously contemplate just taking them since it would require the curtain lady to make a return to Santiago. well, neither one of us could swallow the color, so unfortunately for her, as it was her mistake, she has to make the trip to Santiago. having arrived by taxi to the condo, obviously she does not have car (not surprising actually). this means it will take her all day by public transport to go to Santiago and back.

we tried to help her out by seeing if they had bars at the hardware store here in Cabarete or at Hidelisa in Puerto Plata, but no luck of course. wrong colors and not the right size. that is often the experience here - half stocked store shelfs with not what you want or not enough of what you want. this was one of the many moments here when you just wish you had a Home Depot at your disposal.

on to the next fiasco...we pick up our bedside tables that we had made. see picture above of the guy doing the last few steps of the production. the good news was the guy finished with them on time. a real novelty here. the bad news was despite having a drawing in hand that Veronica had made of the design she wanted, he managed to screw it up. we wanted the main side to have an open shelf. well, he put the opening on one of the sides. the tables were 16X18. he made the opening on the 16" side. if you think about how the tables will be used, one would never have done that.

oh yeah, also the bedside tables are like this reddish brown color. totally NOT the color we wanted either. we probably should have gone to see a sample first of the color on a small portion of one of the tables and then given the green light or not on the color. next time....

so in both cases we said exactly what we wanted and did not get it. what up with following directions? in the case of the woodworker, he just didn't pay attention. in the case of the curtain lady, my guess is that she went to a few shops and they did not have the color we wanted and she just winged it with another color. in her case, i can kind of forgive because i know how difficult it can be to find exactly what you want here in shops that are unpredictably stocked. even if you did call ahead to inquire if they had something you wanted, you could very well go there only to find out that no they don't actually have that color and wouldn't orange be fine anyway? NO IT WOULD NOT.