Contractor update

When we were beginning our home renovation back in 2007, someone wisely told us that when it comes to contractors, you can't have good, fast and cheap. You can have two of the three – good and fast (but expensive), fast and cheap (but crappy), good and cheap (but slow). Or, you know sometimes you only get one of those. But the bottom line is that you can never have all three.

The guy we hired in 2007 was recommended to us as being the miracle – all three. And it shows how very much we adored him that we still believe this to be basically the case. He was fast as the wind. He was cheap as dirt. And he was good for two of the three floors he renovated for us. There were just two problems. One, he was just not qualified to do our basement renovation but he did it anyway. Two, it was January, so the fact that the basement needed more waterproofing was not apparent because the ever-rising water table (it's the end of the world as we know it and I feel fine…) was probably frozen.

The guys who are fixing the basement mess are good. I do believe that they are highly qualified as well as nice people. But they seem overextended. We are not their first priority. Wednesday, for example, the carpenter who needs to come fix the doors was not available so no work was done. Now, this means I had a whole day to actually be outside my house, so I had a truly awful two dollar breakfast at Ikea (million dollar view) and typed this.

The basement started flooding the first week of March. The work started the first week of May. It is now the first week of July. The work was hideously sporadic for the first month. Only when I really got angry in his face did the contractor start devoting a couple of guys each day for many days in a row to our cause. The basement is painfully close to being done. We need some baseboards, some doors and a larger or repaired or cleaned out (or something?) pump.

If we had never worked with the first guy, maybe this would be less frustrating. But Original Contractor (who has disappeared to Honduras or Ohio or something), was just SO fast. This whole project would have been two weeks tops. He had this strange painter guy who didn't seem to speak much English or Spanish but who was truly magical and truly the best and fastest painter we have ever seen. We missed Sergio every day last week as two guys seemingly pissed away days on end taping and plastering and priming and painting and even then had to be checked on by contractor and second in command contractor and contractor's young nephew each day because they just didn't pay great attention to detail.

We had hoped to move GMB back down to the basement over the long weekend. Obviously that did not happen. We are trying to push for this weekend while simultaneously not getting our hopes up.
And after we finish our basement, we need them to retile the back yard that they dug up to waterproof. Tiling requires contractor's 75 year old Italian Uncle Tony. I love him, but he is hard to schedule. And not cheap.