All I Want For My Birthday...

...is my house back.

Shady

Well, we now have a new Project Manager presiding over the whole thing. Hilariously his last name is Shady! He has promised to get all of the ongoing problems addressed. He came out tonight and looked over the whole job site with us and will be communicating with individuals the rest of the week to get things back on track.

This is now the third or fourth conversation like this we've had. Forgive me if I seem a bit jaded, but my attitude at this point is very much, "we'll see..." Just another roll of the dice as far as I'm concerned.

Stay tuned.

Jeep Safe

Not only did they not finish the porch on Friday, they hardly did anything to it. In fact, at first glance it looked like they didn't even come (because I was looking at the actual porch), but then I realized they spent a lot of time moving dirt around.

Wrong again on this. They covered up the grass again. Only we're not moving it this time.

Post It Communication

Liane's way of communicating with the tile guy. Each of these post it notes indicates a problem that we want to see fixed. Boy, he must be frustrated, but I don't know how many ways we can explain that we want consistently spaced grout lines between tiles.

At one point he told her it would be nice to be able to communicate with her while he's here. Her response, "If this job had been nearing completion weeks ago, as was promised, that would be easy. But now that I'm in school I don't know what to tell you."

He's going to have to muddle through...

Porch Status

Meanwhile...the porch guys called the other day and said they'd be here Friday to finish. Yes, you read it right. "Finish."  Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha...

Finish?

I'll eat Klinger's jeep if they finish Friday. And if they do it mistake free I'll...well...I don't know what I'll do. Not going to spend time thinking about it because the chances of that happening are zero.

Olympic Boxing

Olympic boxing matches have three rounds. Well, we're headed to round three on the shower niches. I thought the round two ones looked weird, and when Liane saw it she flipped. The shelf is way too high....

Oh, the humanity! I would really like to get the hour and a half back that each of us spent talking to that guy the other day. And Liane had to do it again today.

Olympic boxing -- round three. Given her frustration level I predict a TKO!

Niche, Round Two

Shower installer guy had to take the two niches out and start from scratch as the job had been botched. This is the new one going in.

First Picture

We hung our first official picture the other day. That's a step in the right direction. Lots more to go.

Clean Up Batter

So we have a new tile guy on the case. Hugh. He's the guy that left the note and ripped a bunch of the tile out. We called him yesterday and had him come over to get into the details of the job.

Turns out this is probably the guy who should have been working on it from the beginning. He seems much more on the ball...although I'll hold final judgement until I see some results. He basically told us that some of the prior work was done wrong and was redoing as much of it as practical.

Hopefully Hugh can bring it all home and finish it off well.

Two Steps Forward and 2 Back

See the picture of our tile progress.

No picture?

Right. There's no need for one. There hasn't really been much progress. Tile has been laid, and then unlaid. I would think it should be clear to them by now that we're relatively picky about it, but alas we had to leave notes on the unacceptable aspects of what they had done in the last few days. Corners and lines were not precise enough.

I came home yesterday to find all of the progress from the week ripped out, and a note requesting a conversation to go over expectations. A guess they are getting a bit frustrated too.

Fit and Finish

Really?

It's all in the details folks.

Coming Together

Siding is up on the inside.

Window for Sale

This is the one we removed from the bedroom to make room for the door to go in. It's in great shape and is probably worth hundreds of dollars. I hate to see it go away in the dumpster, which is what's going to happen if it doesn't get claimed.

The price is right -- FREE, if you come get it and take it away. It's a Pella, very high quality and fully functional -- frame size is 73" x 59"

We're probably going to put it up on Craig's List soon for some small amount of money. But to my friends reading this blog -- Free.

"Aren't you glad you didn't build from scratch?"

This question was posed in a comment for one of the posts.

Aren't you glad you didn't build from scratch?

I've had these thoughts for a while. The answer is, I don't know. I think so.

Without a doubt the most agonizingly difficult part of this -- worse than being behind schedule, dealing with errors and poor communication, and being displaced in our house -- has been the difficult and at times compromising decisions we've had to make. (Sadly that part is far from over too.) I am no decorator. I don't have the ability to always be able to look at a few components out of context and visualize what a space is going to look like (or, more importantly, "feel" like)  with it all put together. The final result is usually something of a surprise to me. Obviously that can be good or bad. These decisions are for the most part permanent. Yes, anything can be changed for enough money, but for all practical purposes we are redefining what this house is, and what it will be. We'll have to live with it, and when we eventually sell it these things will influence that outcome, while at the same time adding relatively little tangible value.

Trying to build a whole custom house, from scratch, with no template to base anything on would have been extremely difficult in this way. So yeah, on some level I am glad we didn't try it. We seriously might have lost our minds in the process. On the other hand...would we have ended up with something closer to what we want? No way to really answer these questions until it's all over and we get enough distance from it to have some perspective.

Right now we make decisions, and make a leap of faith that most will turn out okay.
But yeah, right now I'm glad we don't have 50,000 more little ones to make, and then remake again when a percentage of them don't work out.

Meanwhile...

Across the street an down a few doors someone has nearly built an entire house in the time that our remodeling project has been festering.

Mea Culpa

Our main contact at the general contractor came over to meet with us yesterday. The goal was to get a more realistic time table for work completion. It was a pretty good meeting for the most part. He totally fell on his sword and acknowledged most of the goof-ups, and took personal blame for the appropriate ones. In fairness there really have been some extenuating circumstances at their end (and I have known this) that have made it difficult for them.

Now, this is the part where people say, "I don't care." And I get that. I mean, it really shouldn't be my problem. But...what kind of a world is it we create for ourselves when it becomes all business, when there is no humanity in anything? I get that it's bad to enable incompetence, but it's a fine line before you're on the other side of that coin: just being an inhuman jerk. In the end it's just a house. It's just a project. I'm not willing to betray things I believe in for the sake of potentially getting a project done faster.

Whether there is any slack or forgiveness or not, that stuff is in the past. We're far more interested in knowing what is going to happen moving forward. We did get a number of things nailed down better. The timetable for the two project sounds like two weeks and three weeks. This is until the spaces are fully usable. Full completion of all the details is some as yet undetermined time after that. Sadly I still feel this estimate is optimistic. The guy just can't get out of his own way in that regard. But hey, I could be wrong. We'll see. It looks like the entertainment provided by this blog will continue on for a while yet.

Wrong & Wronger

It is now safe to assume that all posts start with a sigh...

The good news is they have installed the screened windows. The bad new is the trim around them on the outside is all wrong. Yet another in a series of things that were specifically discussed with the general contractor that have somehow been lost in translation to the subcontractor. It was agreed that these screened porch windows would match the hearth/dining room windows (to the left in the photo). This is why they are the same size and shape, and have the same spacing between them. That much went okay, but they put this cedar style trim down rather than putting the siding back up to match the rest of the house. It's a stylistic choice I could see someone making, but we had already decided to make it congruous with the rest of the house. Now they'll have to pull all that work apart and redo it, further delaying the project. Oh, and meanwhile they sealed all the siding up in the attic area above the dining room. It will be interesting to see how they go about getting that out.

To add insult to injury one of the windows is damaged and will have to be replaced.

Also, it's not easy to see, but that last fence post was placed so close to where the window is that there isn't room to put the metal cap on it. So they are going to have to move it, which will require replacing one of the boards in the deck as well. Comedy of errors.

The tile around the tub in the bathroom is not (I don't think) a stylistic issue. This photo doesn't show it that well, but the tile below sticks out farther than the glass tile above. It's much worse than it looks in this photo. It wouldn't have been that hard to make them even. This just seems like such a basic thing to me. I mean...what kind of tiling person doesn't recognize this? Am I missing something?

Let 'em Have it

Liane's patience finally ran out. The carpet guy called to let her know the rug for the porch is not going to be in for another week. She cleverly asked when it had been ordered. A week ago. BOOM! You see, she had given them her selection a month ago. This is the latest in a series of things (doors, windows, etc.) that were not ordered quick enough to be here at the time they were needed, which has caused many delays in the project.

And not only that, she had ended up having to do a lot of research and sample gathering for her choice in the first place because they didn't offer much that was any good.

They asked about possibly making another choice. Wisely she put it back in their court to figure it out. "If Steve wants to run around like I did and gather up a bunch of samples and bring them over to me to select something different I am willing to try that, but otherwise it's unacceptable and you guys need to figure it out."

I feel for the guy. He was really just the messenger. Now he has a message to take back with him.

A Rare Photo

Workers on the job site.

We will eventually get there folks.

Posts

Posts for deck railing going in.

But...

It seems they can never get anything quite right. I mean...who in the world installs something that looks like this and thinks it will be okay? I truly don't believe they do it on purpose. I think construction people gradually lose the ability to see what things look like to regular people. They see things in construction techniques that I don't see, but then they seem completely oblivious to the most obvious stuff.

So...Liane will have to complain and this one will have to be swapped out.

Sigh...

Garbage Can Cabinet

Not really. Just makes a funny picture. This will be a small storage cabinet with a counter on top to help with serving meals outside, etc.

Also note, the bedroom window has been removed and the doors installed in its place. The removed three pane window is probably worth upwards of $1000. If anyone wants one all you have to do is come get it. Let me know.

Tile Going In

It's all well and good, but Liane had to police the installation Thankfully she knows -- from an installation we did at our old house a few years ago -- that I'm not a fan of sloppy work on tile. I expect the edges to be square and the grout lines to be straight with consistent spacing throughout. This one wasn't. She asked about it and got a kinda' lame response, so she went in and started moving them around herself. Finally the guy helped her. A few were too dry to move, but she got most of it.

Wish I could bill them back for crap like that.

Glad We Could Help

Hey, glad we could provide our tub to you to use as a storage bin.

Shower Insert

Continuing to inch forward. The shower insert is almost finished and ready for tile.

Note the rectangular drain at the far end. We were adamant that we didn't want a drain under our feet. Looks like that's going to work out well.

Whatever that stuff is they apply across the cracks and so forth has one of the stronger glue smells I've ever encountered. Even with the otherwise isolated bedroom window open you can smell it in the rest of the house at times.

Fake Hustle

"Fake Hustle" is a phrase sometimes used in sports to characterize those times when an athlete isn't working as hard as he should, but makes enough effort to appear as though he is.

Liane's talk with the woman from the contractor's office the other day not only generated some phone calls (that ultimately resulted in nothing much changing) it seems it has now generated a site visit from some assessor dude at the office. He wanted to come out and see what was happening and talk to her in person about it all. Okay....

What's hilarious is that he was an hour late for his appointment, which thankfully Liane called him on to illustrate her point about how lame the communication and follow through has been. He made some weak excuse, of course. I was at work during all of this, but I encouraged her to not dwell on the past so much. We are where we are. What I'm concerned about is what we're going to do about these things moving forward. She tried to pin him down to some concrete action, but basically the guy was powerless. He's just supposed to report back. Really? You drove all the way out here just to see it and get the same story in person we had already given on the phone?

Wow. There's nothing to see. It's a half finished job. Doors and windows have been ordered and aren't in yet. I'm sure that's a lot of why the porch crew hasn't been out. But we gave them all the info to place the orders in plenty of time (before we went on vacation). When we returned it still hadn't been done. They simply dropped the ball. Wait...that's in the past. What are we doing now?

Nothing concrete. Liane is going to follow up in a day or two.

Normally I'd be really furious about all of this, but I was prepared for it going in, which for some reason makes it bearable.

C'est la vie

We heard the other day that someone has begun building a place on the property we had wanted to buy way back when. Indeed there is a house well under way.

It's fine, although mildly frustrating that they got their (partially front facing) garage approved by the neighborhood association when they wouldn't approve ours.

Links to a few of the drafts...
11/30/2009
11/1/2009
10/3/2009

All of that seems like a long time ago...

Grout

The mind-knumbing minutiae decisions continue. Today it was about choosing the grout color to go between the glass tiles on the backsplash in the kitchen. Only 1/8 of an inch of it will show between those tiles, but it still took awhile to make the choice. In fairness, it is hard. We just have a block of the countertop and a block of the glass. It's not like we can look at it in context really. The lighting is totally different, etc. Final choice of color = Ivory. We also picked out the metal trim color that will go along the edge.

The Latest on Communication

The frustration over the slow progress and lack of communication continues. We finally acquiesced on the plumbing in the shower -- letting them run it through the walls after they screwed up and didn't bury it all in the concrete. They promise it will be silent. We'll see.

We do have to stay on them every step of the way.

But they continue to make promises about communication, and actual work, that are not fulfilled. A lady from the contractor called Liane the other day to check on things. Liane read her the riot act. Subsequently she started getting calls from the subcontractors. Promises were made. And not kept.

It does continue to inch forward, and in the grand scheme of things we're not that gripped about it, but it's annoying. We'd like to move back into our finished house. It will be interesting to see when they ask us for the next installation of payment.

Ceiling

The porch ceiling is going in. There are going to be three large cross beams by the time it's all finished.

This has triggered the latest debate in the Stewart household. Liane has wanted to paint the ceiling a light sky blue. Upon seeing the wood -- I think it's nice looking wood -- I want to just finish it without painting.

Opinions? Use the comments.