Blackballs...

I swear. Kitchen designers/cabinet makers across this great united nation are going to hate me and Steve. I'm telling you, if there's a "List of Blackballed Kitchen Remodelers", we're on it.

Sooo... Steve was showing the neighbor (who is already going to get us our ceramic floor tile dirt cheap) our new kitchen designs. Long story short, he can get us our cabinets dirt cheap too. We're talking like 80% off of the price we were quoted from the new design place. I'm talking like what we thought was going to cost us $16,000- $17,000 could potentially "only" cost us $3,000-$4,000. "How?" you ask. (Or perhaps you don't, but I'm going to tell you anyway.) He works for a kitchen cabinet factory. And he's really high up on their totem pole. Basically, the company he works for is the place that makes them. Then they sell them to places like Lowe's and Home Depot and other kitchen design places for a 30% markup. And they sell them to the average Joe Schmoe (like us) for an additional 50% markup. But he can get us the cabinets without any markup. SWEET!

All he needs is an "official" full-fledged blue print of the design. Um yeah. So now we're trying to figure out how to tell wonderful Mr. Randy at "The World's Largest General Store" that we would like a blueprint from him (which I don't think they charge anything for normally because they assume people will buy the cabinets from them), but no cabinets. *sigh* We're hoping we can throw the guy a few hundred bucks in cash and tell him to consider it a "side job" and hope he doesn't want to kick our ass. But $10,000 in savings is just WAY too much to not take advantage of. I mean, my god, we could end up spending less for the total kitchen than we expected to pay for just the cabinets, sans countertops, floors, backsplash, appliances, plumbing, electrical work, etc.

So I've now, once again convinced Steve that he needs to be the one that tells Randy. I'm not. I don't do well with that kind of shit.