So, no major unsolvable catastrophes, and I do recognize that by comparison with what others are dealing with, especially on the other side of the world right now, these are laughably insignificant. But it does seem that as soon as we solve one problem, something else pops up.

The range arrives. There's a puncture in the wraps and the side is ding'ed. Color is off, does not match sample, does not work. But appliance sales person offers new skins, and Blue Star talks us through the process. Formerly ding'ed brown range is now bottle green, looks good. Check.

DH builds cabinets using old gumwood and new gumwood. New gumwood takes on lurid hue and extreme grain when the cabinets are treated with Waterlox. Looks awful and a complete mismatch between old and new. We take a week to research solutions then DH makes veneers out of old gumwood for all the places where new gumwood had been used. This takes over a month, but now all the gumwood looks consistent. Check.

DH does plumbing and at last we actually take the faucet (purchased last May) out of the box and hold it up. It's gorgeous -- and it is so tall that it blocks the window, which is a casement that opens in. This one is totally my fault. But vendor agrees to take it back (minus restocking fee) since I will purchase an even more ridiculously expensive faucet, same brand, but different style. Check.

After months of looking, finally find marble online (Danby Eureka). Having seen how hard it is to locate this particular marble I don't want to let these slabs get away. Local fabricator says she has dealt with this marble distributor and can bring slabs here for fabrication. I made the deposit on 2/14 but slabs cannot be shipped til the truck is full. When will that be ???????

We finally open the crate containing our copper hood which was delivered February 10. It has been in its box in the garage since then. When it was delivered we opened the top of the box. The hood, wrapped in heavy plastic, looked fine. This weekend we started to take the crate apart to liberate the hood and discovered a big puncture on the underside of the box -- looks like a forklift went right through. Inside, the duct cover of the hood is ripped away from the dome shaped canopy and the duct cover is torqued out of square. Hood maker is now trying to reach shipper to make a claim. Unfortunately I signed off when the hood was delivered, without having checked the under side of the crate. So this is a problem that is not yet resolved.

OK is this the usual level of problem incidence????? Is this level of glitch occurring because we don't know what we're doing? or does everyone have this? It does seem (small sample) there is a high incidence of shipper- caused problems.

May-be I'm just venting here. But there are some lessons. Check everything very, very thoroughly at delivery. Make sure you can count on actuality matching the samples. Measure everything you are thinking of buying against where it will be placed/installed (duh, this is basic, I know). Test all finishes, stains, paints before applying to actual surfaces. I don't think of us as being really inept but we have made a lot of dumb mistakes!!!!