Surely?
OK, let's start gently. Some good things have happened:
- We've finally had enough dry weather that the bare external walls have dried out.
- Not only this, but the dry weather has continued long enough that these outside walls can be rendered and will be pebbledashed tomorrow.
- This is good because it means (I think) that the scaffolding can finally come down and we can see our actual house again. A major breakthrough.
- A few units in the kitchen have been fitted, including the worktop with the sink (which has been mostly plumbed)
- The wrappers have come off our new cooker and it looks GREAT.
- The external doors finally arrived the right way round and have been inserted into the appropriate appertures in the house.
- With the exception of a couple of bits of "finishing off" around windows, we are now mostly plastered (and the house)
- In certain lights the ceiling in our new bedroom is now completely painted
- Our new bedroom walls are ready to have the topcoats of coloured paint applied
- So is Little Miss's bedroom
- So is the family bathroom.
All this painting (whitewash plus 1 topcoat on the bedroom & bathroom walls, whitewash plus 2 topcoats on the ceilings) has taken about 20 hours to do.
However, in a less positive mode:
- The ensuite bathroom still needs its first white topcoat before it's ready for colour (that's about 5 hours per coat)
- There are no picture rails in our bedroom or Little Miss's so we can't do any more on the walls until then.
- We've still got to paint the entire kitchen, study, utility room and cloakroom from bare plaster.
- I don't know exactly how many hours of painting are left to be done, but it's got to be 50+. I have no idea when that's going to get done.
- Oh, and let's not forget all the woodwork that needs painting (skirting boards and picture rails, when they arrive)
- The holes and cracks Paul the Builder made in the playroom wall and ceiling still need to be repaired and the ceiling is lath and plaster and will be a difficult job to fix.
- Paul the Builder asked us for some payment and I pointed out that it wasn't due until he got more stuff actually finished. When Paul the Builder realised this, he immediately stopped all work on the kitchen and threw all his work on finishing what was needed to get payment.
Worse news:
The tiling of the bathrooms hasn't even been started. The materials were bought urgently at the start of the week and we were promised that this would be done during last week so that the family bathroom, at least, would be fully ready for us to use when we moved back in on Monday. The chap who does the tiling for Paul the Builder has been on site since Wednesday, but hasn't actually been allowed to do any tiling. Instead, he's been running errands and doing odd jobs for Paul the Builder all week.
However, the worst news is this:
Throughout the week, we've been working on the understanding that Paul the Builder was finishing off all the major internal stuff this week, and over the weekend, so that it would be safe and clean for us to move back on Monday. The main thing here was plastering of the hall, landing and staircase. One of Paul the Builder's workers was even set to work on Friday (and Saturday morning) preparing the walls so they could be plastered and dry by Monday so we could be home with no chance of little hands leaving their mark in new plaster, or getting in the way generally.
Anyway, the house was crawling with two teams of plasterers all day today, doing the render, but their boss declared there was "no way on earth" that they would be able to even start the plastering inside before Monday and that it was not going to be finished before Wednesday. Apparently I'm just meant to accept this as "one of those things, mate" and get on with life as a refugee.
I really don't know what to say or do now. The urge to tell Paul the Builder to get him and his men out of our damned house and leave us alone is occasionally overwhelming.
The slightly more level-headed side of me is intending to tell Paul the Builder that he has until Wednesday (when this last plastering is done) to get the rest of the house in order and all his rubbish off my propertly and then he can clear off and stay out. This ought, at least, to get us picture rails, doors (with working handles and frames) and all the last bits of incidental plaster tidying up finished. From there, he can stick his final payment where the sun doesn't shine (and I don't mean Sheringham).
However, given that everything we've been promised so far has either taken 2-3 times as long as planned, or just simply not been done at all, I don't have much faith even in this strategy.
Frankly, from here on, it's "just" plastering and kitchen fitting to do and - bluntly - any berk picked out of Yellow Pages can do these jobs at a time of our choosing. Letting someone else do the jobs we want doing and having Paul the Builder get out of our lives and leave him free to properly concentrate on the next job (rather than having to pretend to concentrate on ours at the same time) feels quite appealing to me and possibly him too, I imagine.
However, this is just likely to delay completion even more. I am, therefore, comprehensively at a loss.
We've promised the children that they can be back at home on Monday. This won't happen. We've promised my inlaws they can have their house back on Monday. This won't happen.
At this rate the children aren't going to have a summer holiday at all. Equally, we're not going to get to go on holiday next Saturday because we won't actually be able to get back in to our house to get the things we need to pack to GO on holiday.
I don't mind saying that I've genuinely been in tears today. I'm not saying this in some 21st Century, showing-I-am-a-New-Man-and-revealing-my-vulnerable-side sort of way but because this is so damned frustrating and painful this is what it has reduced me to. I seriously hope there are no ore setbacks on this because I really don't know how I'm going to handle them.
No comments:
Post a Comment