Something I learned years ago from my brother-in-law who is a contractor. Never buy a house that is built on a cement slab without a crawl space or a house with any appliances (furnace, a/c, water heater) above the ground level. :o) Upstairs plumbing can be a real problem too! I have heard so many horror stories!



>In this house we had a problem with the edge of the roof. The hose that was supposed to lead the condensed water out of the attic AC unit was not ending where it should, so the water dripped all over the inside of the soffit. The board eventually bent sufficiently to let squirrels in. They made a nest in the attic, bit the hose and generally ruffled the insulation. The damage wasn't extensive (though I had to sit up there in unbearable heat for hours, drilling a hole to lead the new hose into the vertical sewer vent), but the rot did spread and we eventually had to do something about other animals finding shelter in our attic, and possibly rainwater getting deeper in.
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>So we opened up yellow pages and found a contractor. He came soon enough, and had a look at what was there to do, sent us an offer and that was it. His guys came yesterday, and did the job fast enough... but:
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>- when they were finished, they didn't even knock on the door to say "we're done, come see". They just packed up their gear and vanished.
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>- I did not get a report (maybe their boss will come with one, and a bill, later). I wouldn't know that I should replace the lower two rows of shingles if I didn't talk with one of the workers
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>- the hole is still there. Its lower part is fixed (as stated in the offer), but the upper part is still open. They didn't even bother to tell me. And it's not that they couldn't see it - it was in front of their noses.
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>I've noticed this about the way things are done in the US (and maybe other countries with... well, what could be the cause - legal system based on common law?). First, they reduce the task, then do exactly nothing beyond the checklist. I said "close that hole", and it somehow became "replace the soffit" and all of a sudden there's no mention of any hole. When I had vibrations in my car wheels, I asked the guys in the garage to check for the possible reasons - bent rotor, or brakes or whatever, you tell me. The work order said "replace brakes" and mentioned no vibrations whatsoever. And the vibrations were actually caused by irregularly worn tires, which a friend mechanic told me by just talking. So now I have new tires and new brakes - works fine, but no thanks to the garage guys. They told me nothing, even though "you tell me" was part of the order. This horse-goggle tunnel vision goes so far that I've seen a retailer in T-Mobile say "no we don't have that kind of phone card." - with
>an explicit period and silence at the end of the sentence. We had to ASK "where can we buy it then?" - and only then he said "oh we have another T-Mobile (read: tee-mowbl) shop 200 yards from here, they have it". Why didn't he volunteer that information? Because we didn't ask, and we, being Europeans, didn't think that we needed to ask. But it came, as an afterthought, as we remembered where we were.
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>I don't have the patience for this labyrinthine (or should I say Byzantine) zigzag. Do I have to learn the language of each and every trade when I need anything done? Do I need to learn to say "caveat emptor" at contractor level for every kind of work? If so, then learning the actual work is much more fun, costs far less, and I already got most of the tools. And I get to keep the tools in the end.
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>I could have saved the $1500 that this'll cost me - I could have bought a tall ladder and whatever material I needed (wouldn't cost more than $600 altogether), but I wanted to get this done fast and didn't want to bother with where to put the ladder once we're done.
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>I'm definitely NOT calling another local or non-local contractor to do what this one skipped. I'm buying a ladder now. Next job, the recovering (ahem, re-covering) of the whole roof, will be done by a completely different contractor, a guy who does Fox for living. And I'm not paying him a dime.
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>SET RANT &SetRant