Menards is the Wal-Mart of Home Improvement

Two home improvement projects attempted today, both completed...somewhat successfully. All the materials were purchased from Menards, which I'm not real happy with at this point.

First was replacing the closet doors on the washer/dryer closet. Turns out the new 30 inch doors are a quarter inch wider than the old 30 inch doors, and despite as much tweaking as possible, they just won't shut. At the bottom, that is. They do shut at the top, which is just weird. The doors are of pretty sketchy quality - for 44 bucks a piece I expected better. Another question though - what is the deal with rounding off important measurements? I was buying a piece of wood for a shelf a while ago, and there was the "actual measurement" and the "advertised measurement", both different numbers? Who goes around marketing 30 inch doors that aren't actually 30 inches, or a 18 inch piece of wood that's actually 17 1/2? That's ridiculous.

Second was replacing the medicine cabinet in my bathroom. The old one had a variety of failures, including one missing mirror and the mirror track was broken, meaning the remaining mirror was just perched on the edge, waiting to fall at any moment. So I picked out a pretty standard looking medicine cabinet/light fixture thing, and attempted to install it.

Removing the old one should have been a clue - the screws were all in the wall crooked, and all but one of which didn't hit anything but drywall. At that point I realized the shapes of the cabinets were different, so the hole in the wall which the wires (for the lights) are fed through would no longer in a convenient place. To make a long story short, I put a couple bonus holes in the wall, but the cabinet made it up. I think I matched the previous installer's record of one out of four screws in a stud. I'd like to thank the producers of the medicine cabinet for putting the "mounting boards" on the back directly behind shelves, making it almost impossible to put a screw through, and certainly impossible to put a screw through straight.

And as an added bonus, the wires coming from the wall were just barely long enough to reach, even after adding a bonus hole in the side of the medicine cabinet. Which I suppose worked out well, but I was a little concerned for a minute.

So I suppose it worked out - the cabinet is up, the lights work, and just a couple extra holes (oh, and a broken drill bit, which I believe is partially left in the wall as a "gift" to a future inhabitant). There is some missing wallpaper now visible where the old medicine cabinet used to be, which is pretty ugly, but it's going to have to do. The wallpaper is a little ugly anyway, if you ask me, so I guess maybe that's a push.

Moral of the story - of two products purchased from Menards today, I would say 100% of them sucked. Well, I did buy some compact fluorescent lightbulbs that seem to be good. So 2 of 3 products purchased sucked, if you count lightbulbs.