Home remodeling rant

[Drang]

Since we bought our house in Jan 2013,...
All told, over the last 7 years, I'm about $150K in repairs and upgrades on this house. I am NOT going to miss it when we move this summer...

Did Tom Hanks and Shelly Long pay you royalties from their movie...?

[Tensaw]

Reading all this makes me feel better about what I have going on at the moment. It started with a cracked fiberglass bathtub/shower insert. Yanked that out to find rotten sub-floor. Well, that, of course, means the finished floor has to come up in the bathroom, and down the hallway, and into the kitchen. Oh, we should cut through this wall and create a pantry? Sure. Oh, more rotten wood /gaping holes in the kitchen sub-floor? No problem. Concurrent with all this, I got my ~20 year old HVAC unit replaced. Very simple system with very good access to everything. Wanna guess how long that took? Two days? Ha! The guy put in five hours the first two days. He did work for five whole hours on the third day (during which time his 60 year old helper hit on my 80 year old mother-in-law ). The last thing he said rolling out of the driveway at the end of the third day was, "See ya'll tomorrow!" Hmmm... Next day, no A/C guy, no call, just the sound of the crickets chirping.... Fifth day I told him not to bother to come by because there was no one available to open the house for him; also, if he could not wrap it up the following day, we would be parting ways. That day he showed up and worked his ass off for 9 hours. Good, fast, cheap - pick any two.

As of a couple days ago, I got the 350 pound Kohler (oddly enough) cast iron tub set in place (this bad boy won't be cracking!). Now if I can just crack the code on a tub drain that will span my 2 inches of sub-floor, I will be in business. Did get the toilet temporarily re-installed so now we are back to having a number two for the Number Two!

Next up, I need to find a concrete guy who will actually show up and bid on my 30x30 slab for a carport without tearing the wallet off my azz.

[jeffhughes]

Sigh....yeah, there’s guys like that. They make the rest of us look bad.

I have no reason to delay your job, and if you don’t trust me then you should probably hire someone else.

.

This

[jeffhughes]

Just like I'm not in the building business, I'm in the repeat client business.

And this

[Darth_Uno]

I don't think most of them are malicious, or even incompetent for that matter. Like most things, they just don't actually have a clue what business they are in. They mistakenly think that they are in the building business when in reality they are in the "make a happy customer" business.

Just like I'm not in the building business, I'm in the repeat client business.

So much I could say about this.

I've certainly no intentions of being either malicious or incompetent. For that matter, I don't know of any major contractors that fall into either category. But I think some of them, and possibly myself included, run into issues when they haven't explained to the customers exactly what to expect. We know the process, because we do it every day, but honestly the majority of customers don't.

The flip side is, what you don't want to hear is, "I used to be in construction..." If you're in the trades, you know exactly what I'm talking about when a customer whips that line out.