It’s been a while. Things have been pretty stressful lately. I haven’t really been able to keep up with the blog very well. But that’s okay. It’s here for me when I need it or want to talk about something. So let’s talk. The phone thing has been…weird lately. Some days I do really well with not using it, and other days I don’t do so well. It’s been really difficult to find the willpower to detach myself from it lately because I’ve been dealing with a good deal of stress with my house renovations, and I’ve been using my phone as a crutch or comforting blanket to distract myself.

The problem that I’ve been dealing with my renovation is that it isn’t finished, and I really wish it were. My contractor made a lot of promises and hasn’t followed through. Big surprise, right? When do they ever follow through? I thought I had found one that I could rely on to show up and get things done. I had not.

The surround for both of my upstairs bathrooms was removed on September 15th. It is October 23 as of writing this. A lot of excuses and reasons why he hasn’t shown up have blended together, and I can’t really remember what went wrong around September 15th. But! I do remember that the week of the 5th through the 9th, he didn’t really show up at all and didn’t give any reasoning until later in the week. I called him and asked whether he planned to come that week, and I can’t remember what he said, to be honest.

I don’t really remember the week of the 11th-17th super well. I think he only came once that week after 1:00 or so, and not much got done beyond him finally touching up the tile work he’d done in the kitchen.

Next week rolls around, and he showed up after lunch on Tuesday the 20th. They got a lot of the backer board up and built the bench that’s going to be in the walk-in shower. Then he just doesn’t come back the rest of the week.

This week he only shows up once on Tuesday. He comes in and says, “Ms. Vaahli, please don’t be mad at me.” He goes on to explain that he’s got another job with a flooring company that keeps putting him on the schedule when he has other work already scheduled. He also tells me that the previous week he had pulled a muscle and needed to go to the doctor. Apparently, he’d pulled this muscle while working on my house. I’m wondering why he didn’t say anything when it happened, and also I’m sorry, but that’s not my responsibility (especially if he didn’t say anything when it happened). He just keeps talking and won’t let me get a word in. I just stand there listening and trying not to get upset because I don’t communicate effectively when I am mad anyway. So I tell him, “It’s okay; just let’s get this job going.”

On top of him just not showing up and not communicating with me, there were things that he did that really interfered with our lives. Other than not having a garage because it’s a mess while they’re using it to store different things, he took all the bathroom doors off their hinges. And honestly, nobody is using the bathroom because there’s no toilet upstairs to use at the moment…But the door issue becomes a problem for one of the bathrooms because, while they’re still trying to sort out the plumbing, the wall behind where the showerhead will go is open to the attic. You might guess that the attic is hot. You’d be correct. All that hot air is pouring into the rest of the upstairs, and there is no way for us to cut that off because we don’t have doors! The cats are also going into the attic during all of this, and I don’t want them in there. What if they get stuck or mess with something they shouldn’t?

Munchie is an absolute menace, and I wouldn’t put it past her.

This week he did finally put one door back up, so we can now better control the temperature upstairs. We normally don’t run the air up there anyway unless we’re up there, which is usually only in the evenings. But the temperature inside got up to like 88 degrees Fahrenheit, and our air conditioner couldn’t get the temp down because hot air kept coming in. And now, it’s getting cold outside, so I don’t care about the temperature as much. But we were melting for like a month! I did ask him last week to do something about it, and he just didn’t do it. I reminded him about it this week, and I had zero belief that he would actually do it, but he did. So yay, I guess.

Another thing that irritates me is that he put down the kitchen floor back towards the beginning of September. He was supposed to place these threshold pieces at each doorway because the floor beyond each door is different or leads outside. All but two have been completed, and I reminded him about that every week for the last three weeks, and he still hasn’t done it. It’s the last thing that needs to be done, aside from us putting things back where they go and sealing the butcher block countertop (this also should have been completed by now by someone else, but I’m not naming names). It’s infuriating. He wasn’t even going to finish the backsplash until I told him to! I wouldn’t have been able to put things back on the counter and leave them there until that was finished.

We’re so close to the kitchen renovation being completed. Just two pieces of wood. Just two pieces.

And for whatever reason, his not finishing his parts makes me feel like I can’t move forward with other aspects of the two projects. It’s the reason we haven’t fully put the kitchen back together. (Well, that and my husband hasn’t sealed the countertop yet. Oops.)

I need him to finish the bathroom tile so I can paint everything and hang my new towel rods and toilet paper holders. I have painted one of the bathrooms nearly to completion just because I got tired of waiting. I went ahead and repaired the drywall in the other one. But I can’t sand in there because there’s no floor, and I don’t want the dust to get in the backer board and cause some problems.

Ugh!

My life is turned upside down right now. He even said it himself three weeks ago. “You want some normalcy back.” Hell yeah, I want some normalcy back. I can’t go to the bathroom upstairs. We ran our AC so hard I thought we were going to kill it. We can’t really have company over because the guest room is an extension of their work area, and they wouldn’t have their own bathroom. We can’t keep the house clean because there’s dirt and dust from the work they’ve done, and when they come back, they just dirty it up all over again.

And I am so stressed because I don’t like getting mad at people, and I don’t want him to get mad at me for being mad at him. But I wouldn’t be mad at him if he would just finish the job. I’m so worried about how everything is going to turn out that I can’t relax. I lie awake at night going through what might happen when he finally comes back. Will he get to work and get it done? Will he yell at me? Will he do a bad job on purpose? Will it just be more of the same?

I don’t know.

I’m worried about this because he called me yesterday (Thursday) at 2:00 after he didn’t show up and after I had called him and he didn’t answer. He gave me the whole “Please don’t be mad at me, Ms. Vaahli” schtick again and started to go on, explaining whatever the issue was this time.

I cut him off.

I said. “I’m gonna stop you right there. Just stop. I am mad. I’ve tried very hard not to be mad, but I am. I need this to get done. Don’t bother coming today because it’s too late at this point. We will see you Monday. Early.”

He said, “Yes, ma’am. We’ll see you early Monday.”

I didn’t yell. I was firm and controlled. I didn’t cry (I tend to do that when I’m mad and in an argument. It’s not something I like about myself). I got out what I needed to say, and I think he’ll do what he said he would. I’m not sure why I blindly believe that. Maybe it’s because he didn’t argue?

Anyway, rant over. This is why I’ve been more absent. I normally make these posts when I’m not busy at work, but I haven’t been at work as much because I’ve been wrangling contractors. And when I have been at work, I’ve had my hands busy working on small renovations here.

I can’t wait to have my house back. I really want to start other projects too. Once the bathrooms are fully completed, I want to work on the wallpaper in my laundry room. It needs to come down before I can paint it. It’s going to look so much better when it’s finished!

Also, I will say that this has been a valuable experience. I’m a little mad at myself for the things that I let slide. I won’t let them slide again. So here are some things that I’ve learned, and if you’re reading this, feel free to say I should have known better or take it as advice for yourself. Not everyone knows how to handle things perfectly the first time they do something. I like to learn from others’ mistakes, and this time I didn’t have that luxury.

Things that I would do differently when working with a contractor:

1. Get a quote in writing. ( I didn’t do this with this guy because I thought that I could trust him because I had done some work with him on the kitchen and laundry room through another contractor before I hired him for the bathroom projects.) No matter how much you think you trust someone, get it in writing. This might seem obvious to you, and it would’ve been for me too, but I thought I could trust the guy. If something screwy is going on with the cost of this, I don’t have any proof that there is a problem. All I have is my fuzzy memory.

2. Get itemized receipts for labor and materials. Again, this might be obvious, but I thought I could trust the guy. I can’t say for certain that I was screwed over on the cost of this job, but other random costs came up along the way that weren’t mentioned at the beginning. This will also just help you keep track of what you have and haven’t paid for.

3. Establish expectations. I went into this thinking he knew what my expectations were, and then he kinda just walked all over me. I wish that I had told him that I would like to have the project done by a certain date and that I would like for him to tell me if he’s not going to show up. (This should just be common courtesy, but here we are.)

4. Document additions. Sometimes things come up along the way, like I mentioned. If they do, document them. Either have them give you something in writing or write it up yourself and have them sign it.

5. Take pictures of checks or get a checkbook with carbon copies. We are supposed to be able to see the checks online through our bank, but for whatever reason, the check I wrote to this guy came up blank. So I don’t have any real record of what I wrote him until I started doing this later in the process.

6. Don’t pay for work that hasn’t been completed. At this point, he still has a lot of work to do, but I only owe him $1,000. If I had someone pick up where he left off, it would cost like $3,000-$6,000. Yes. I know. This was very stupid. I don’t know how to tell people no, and I didn’t set expectations ahead of time. I should have told him the few times that he asked for payment for labor that I wouldn’t pay it until it was finished, but he told me he had to pay his workers. I kind of didn’t know how to handle this at the time. This is where setting expectations comes into play. If I were to go back to the beginning, I would tell him that I would pay for materials, but I wouldn’t pay for labor until the project was completed. I thought paying for the labor along the way was the right thing to do, and it can be, but if they owe you more work than you owe them money, you end up in a situation like mine.

7. Leverage. Luckily, I have a piece of leverage I can use should this all go super sideways. The contractor I mentioned earlier, who introduced me to the one who is doing my bathroom, is a close family friend. I don’t want to bother him until I get to last resort territory. The family friend contractor has hired my bathroom contractor a good bit in the past. If I give him the nasty account of how things have gone thus far, he probably won’t hire him again. So an unrealistic piece of advice I have is to find leverage. I know not everyone is going to have that option, but if you have it, it’s powerful. (I haven’t threatened him with it yet either, but if this next week doesn’t go well, I will. My mom has already complained to the family friend about this, and he called up my bathroom contractor and chewed him out. My contractor then called me asking about that, and oof, what a mess.)

These are all the things that I can think of at the moment, and the main theme is to just keep good documentation of everything along the way so you know what you’re paying for, when you’re paying, and how much you will be paying.

What tips do you have for working with contractors?