Trimming your expectations

Things have taken a turn for the worse, or better, depending on your perspective.

On Friday night we decided that we had had enough with our contractor's runarounds. He would never give us a firm date on anything. On Tuesday when he got back in town he said he could finish the kitchen and bathroom by the end of next week "no problem". That forecast got less and less optimistic with each day, with "no problem" being replaced with, "we'll see" "let's see what happens". This is after he said he was going to come over and work all day Friday, but somehow only managed to get water lines to the fridge and dishwasher hooked up. Then he even said that we ought to be doing back flips because he was going to come over Sunday and work all day. When Andrea pointed out that he hadn't finished what he said he was going to finish yet, he got offended and basically said that he was done until we can talk to him like he's somebody.

Somebody. Somebody we're paying to do work for us, supposedly as a favor. It's not exactly a favor if the work isn't getting done. We are just in need of some honesty; if you can't get the work done, then let us know so we can find someone who will. We're already behind schedule, this thing was supposed to be done two weeks ago. So, we're done with him and there is not even a need for a final confrontation since we're paid up to this point already. I feel like a call to him at this point would be akin to surrender, and it's not as if there aren't plenty of people out there looking for work.

So now we're left with a mostly-finished kitchen minus a functioning sink and a few cabinet doors, and a bathroom with no plumbing (but a very nice tile floor.) We've got some leads, so hopefully some of them will bear some fruit soon. We were hoping that the house would be move-in ready by the end of the week, and that prospect is now looking pretty uncertain. If we can find someone in the next day or so, we should be fine. All it really needs is someone working there 8 hours a day until the end of the week. I'm feeling somewhat optimistic about it at this point, but I'm trying to try to look at our situation in a day to day sense to not get overwhelmed. This was a pretty tough pill to swallow so late in the game; I wish things had come to a head earlier, but there is nothing we can do about it now.

Meanwhile, we're doing what we can. We've officially started doing trim, and we're gonna order doors today. We splurged and bought really tall 7.25" baseboards and we're really excited about it. We started putting some down yesterday but couldn't really do much of it since we're going to have to wait and see how big the door casings are. But so far it looks absolutely fantastic. I'll try to have a man update about that at some point, time permitting.

That's it for now. Hopefully things will look a lot different by the end of the week than they do at the moment.