The drywall got delivered about a week ago.

Yep, about 100 sheets sitting in the driveway.

Now I need to bitch about California for a minute.

First, the house has ceilings that are a couple inches higher than eight feet. Typically, in this situation, I order half the load in “stretch” board that is 54 inches tall, to avoid having to run a filler strip in the center of the room. That way you slam the 4 foot wide board against the ceiling, then cut the bottom off the wide panel for a perfect fit. Plus, since I am a super picky, perfectionist trim carpenter, I like a nice flat wall at the bottom so my baseboards don’t roll into the tapered edge and mess up my inside corners.

But, when I asked the supplier for stretch board, they had never heard of it.

Whaaaat? This isn’t Lowe’s or Home Depot. This is a drywall supplier. I told them I needed to recalculate and would call back.

So I called another big drywall supplier, even though they were out in Anaheim. (about an hour from here) No go. “We sell 4 x 12 sheets all day long,” they told me. “You must be from back East.”

Whatever. I called the first guy back and placed the order. But he can’t take a credit card over the phone. He E-mails me some credit card authorization form to fill out and E-mail back.

Um, no. Having fought off a couple of identity fraud cases due the Blue Cross hack, that’s a non-starter for me. So I tell him I will drive to them and do the order in person.

When I get there, I ask, just to make certain that I know what to expect, if they deliver into the house.

Nope. Curbside.

So bitch number two is that everywhere else I’ve ever ordered drywall the supplier delivers into the house.

For free.

The guys that do it are real pros. They crane it in through windows and cart it in through doors about a dozen sheets at a time. They could load a order the size of this one in about 20 minutes.

So now I needed to arrange for some laborers to haul it from the driveway to the back of the house and scatter it in the three bedrooms. Everyone told me to just go to Home Depot and grab some “guys” that congregate there for day labor jobs in the mornings. Only problem is, I’ve never actually seen these “guys.”

A friend mentioned a handyman they used and thought he could line up some help. So I set it up with him.

Morning of, his help bails and he’s left holding the bag — with me — to hump that pile into the house.

That was some major suckage!