November 2021 – Finally the Last Trip to Menards

November 2021 so I unintentionally lied to you guys in my last blog post. I tend to write my posts a bit ahead of time and there is absolutely NO LOGICAL REASON for the garage addition to have NOT been completed when the last post came out… And its not all of our fault! Yes, NOW, it is finally totally completed at the writing of this blog post but, realistically, it never should have taken this long. November 2021, between back orders in shipping materials, horrible weather and a bizarre amount of little irritating issues we kept running into… the garage addition (literally just a little glorified lean-to) became this bizarre headache in our lives… I’m sure you guys are probably even sick of me talking about it at this point!

When you get burned every single time you go and work on something it gets tough to keep at it…

That was our garage addition.

November 2021 so, in all fairness, I really should have expected something else to somehow go wrong…

The last of our materials came into Menards within a week of my ordering them with absolutely no problems and then we waited… and waited… and waited. (Its an hour drive we’re not going to waste the gas until we can pick up everything.)

Finally, the four 12 foot sticks of vinyl brick molding came in!

Sunday we got up early!

We hooked the trailer up!

We got to Menards!

This was our last trip!

We were so excited!

They loaded up our trailer…

except for the brick molding…

Both of us (and the entire yard crew at Menards) looked and looked and looked…

After TWO hours of looking…

WE ALL GAVE UP.

Lodi laughed initially, “I knew it. There had to be a problem. We can’t do anything with this garage without a problem.”

Normally I would have laughed at the ridiculousness too but, seriously, it was SO FEW materials, “BULL SHIT! It is literally just four sheets of steel, four pieces of corner trim and FOUR PIECES OF BRICK MOLDING. How could this go wrong?!”

Defeated, and trying so VERY hard not to snap on each other, we forced ourselves into the store to get the rest of our shopping done…

(My brain was working double time trying to figure out what to do now besides give up and just go home like I wanted to… but then we would have to COME BACK!)

Brick molding is COMMON – it goes around doors!

It is literally what is around our garage doors right now which was purchased from Menards! I just needed to replace one piece on one of our original garage doors and trim out around our new garage door.

How could something so basic become such a problem!?

(We ended up just buying the wood brick molding that they had in stock so we could finish the garage. Its not ideal like vinyl… but I’ll just paint it out in white Rustoleum…)

November 2021, finding a solution, knowing we would NOT have to buy one more thing for this project, made us both feel considerably better… eventually.

We were able to get a refund of what was over $200 for the vinyl brick molding that we wanted. (Yes that is over $50 for a 12 foot stick of molding – the prices of everything this year were just shocking.) Menards is still convinced its in their yard somewhere though their yard crew agrees with us – IT DOESN’T EXIST!

Case and point: they gave us a refund.

I shall forever equally hate and love Menards. We got enough Menards rebates from our garage addition that it more than paid for a chest freezer for us!

Moving on from that amazing start to November 2021 I happened to have two four day weekends off that month so I totally finished the dang garage addition.

It was cold and windy and snowing (of course) and I just gave myself the, “You were born and raised in northern Minnesota stop being such a wimp!” pep talk.

I had a horrifying notion with the brick molding that I was going to cut one of them wrong… I only had four sticks… I could not screw up one cut. It made me sweat! Such a simple job that normally I could do in my sleep, but because of all of the problems we had with this garage it totally stressed me out lol.

I did not make a single wrong cut!

November 2021 I keep reminding myself that IT IS FINISHED because I find it kind of hard to believe! (Posts coming out all about it soon!)

Ok, moving on.

I hope you all had a wonderful Turkey day!

As usual I was in charge of the turkey. We got two birds this year as both Lodi and my aunt get one from their employers. I did what I have come to always do with the turkey because I have yet to find a tastier way to make it.

The night before I d-boned both birds and put the meat in a crock pot in the refrigerator seasoned liberally with sage, rosemary, thyme, garlic, salt and pepper etc. Then I made homemade turkey stock with the turkey bones. (Here’s how I make stock.)

In the morning I pour some of the stock over the meat then I cook it all day on low in the crock pot. Later, I use the rest of the stock to make gravy.

So little cleanup!

I can’t get over how simple it is and, besides having to d-bone two big birds, just how easy!

The turkey ends up melt-in-your-mouth, fall-apart, so-moist, so-tender, absolutely to-die-for.

It also freezes awesome.

Its become one of those situations where no one would forgive me if I didn’t make the turkey exactly that way lol.

Kind of like when I go to my extended family’s Thanksgiving and they tell me to bring my German mashed potatoes. I have no choice in the matter. (BTW it was pretty great to actually finally SEE my extended family as this Turkey day was the first in two years since Covid that we all got together.)

It is pretty neat to have made something people love like that and remember though!

I hope you guys got a laugh out of our garage ridiculousness – don’t feel bad, it really is quite funny… which I can say now because its finally over after six months of set backs.

I know all of us DIYer have been through such outrageousness before so here’s to smoother projects in the future for all of us!

Hope everyone had a great November!