Cadillac, here we come

One of the things that we knew we would haver to replace when we became homeowners was the garage door on our house. The seller originally agreed to fix it but in her state of mental breakdown changed her mind. And that's okay because it was truly beyond repair. It was sort of buckling in on itself at the seams and sometimes wouldn't go down. It became a game for Wesley and I - before we could leave to go anywhere, we'd sit at the end of the driveway and chant, "Go down! Go down!" And then lately it developed another quirk - going up by itself. We would come home from being gone all day to find it wide open, inviting the world to come in and steal our watering cans and half used rolls of duct tape.

This week we had finally had enough of the garage door drama. Bryan called to get an estimate but it had really gotten past the point of being optional and had moved into the category of necessary.

I'm just going to be open about all of this - we're friends, right? So we had been planning on spending $700 or so on the new door. Because we just had gutters put on and we still need to put up a fence so the neighbor will stop complaining that Winnie poops in her yard. Bryan talked with the guy outside and when he came in, I immediately knew we were in trouble.

"It's going to be a little more than we thought," Bryan told me. But he was going with the guy back to the door shop to see if there were any on sale that might work.
When he had been gone for over an hour, I knew that we were really, really in trouble. He returned armed with pamphlets and shifty eyes.

Now, I had stupidly thought that buying a new garage door would be simple - you know, pick a color, windows or no windows, and you're done. I was wrong. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 million options available and a good salesman will convince you that if you don't get at least half of them, your children will end up in prison because you didn't love them enough to buy a better quality garage door.

Bryan told me that it was going to be $1300. And that was a screamin' deal for this door. He probably should have told me to sit down first.

"But," he said, "this is the like Cadillac of garage doors." As opposed to the Ford Festiva of garage doors we could have gotten on our budget, apparently. "And it has a lifetime guarantee," he assured me. I didn't ask but my thought was, "Whose lifetime?" Because when Sam's Club first opened, my dad bought a lifetime membership. A few years later, he got a notice in the mail that it was no longer valid. And he wasn't dead...

But that's beside the point I guess. I tried to mourn the financial loss we were about to take by brainstorming what else I could buy with $1300. I could either get a breast augmentation in a third world country or buy about two tanks of gas. Either way, we aren't really giving up much.
Heck, maybe we should have gone for the Ferrari of garage doors. Wesley doesn't need to go to college anyway.