I’m sick of them. You want to get up early, fine. You do NOT get to tell the other HALF OF THE WORLD that they have to get up early, too. I’m not over here insisting that we start work during your dinner hour and go until 10pm because that’s better for me. Show the same respect.
We are getting one bedroom and another bathroom painted. The small job was “easy” and convenient because they are the same company who has been painting all the common areas of our building. They have been doing a wonderful job.
But as is normal for any type of contractor, they can’t plan a schedule to save their lives. We started talking to them over a month ago. We were told we’d “hear from [them] soon.” Ten days went by, so I reached out. They said it would be longer….and honestly, kinda acted like I was rushing them. Hey dude, ten days isn’t “soon” when we can see that you are nearly done with our whole building.
We hear from them on a Wednesday. He needs our colors again (the ones he wrote down when he was here), and they wanted to do Monday. We didn’t stop living our lives while we waited for them to catch up to us, and we have things early that week. So we asked about Wednesday and reminded them that 10am was our early start. All was fine.
The day before the job, they want to move it to 9am so they can finish in one day. Um, excuse me? You have a whole team of about six guys, and you think that extra hour is critical to getting one bedroom and one bath painted in one day? We have already done our prep of removing everything from the walls and cleaning out the spaces.) If you need an extra hour so you can roll straight from us to the apartment next door, then why must we be the 9am job instead of 3pm? We know they will walk out the door at 3pm and everything could have started at 10am just fine. (Or, they’ll show up at 9am, but then need to go get the paint. If they do that, we will have words!)
Today is Fat Tuesday and we have Mardi Gras plans tonight. We aren’t going to be out very late, but that still affects 9am vs 10am.
Construction culture is awful. They don’t plan anything ever. They just wait until something is done to even start talking about the next thing. It’s like their managers have never heard of a Gantt Chart, despite many of them going to college for a degree good for a construction business.
FUCK Morning Larks and their total disregard for Night Owls. We had an agreement, asshole.
Yes. Sometimes stuff happens, especially in construction even, and that means plans change. But when you don’t make any plans at all, you guarantee it will go sideways.
And then, he wrote back and said he found some more guys and could do 10am after all. But he couldn’t answer my question of what time they’d be done. He doesn’t know how long it will take because they don’t know how long it will take the spackle to dry. Really? You’ve been patching holes and painting stuff in this building for a whole month and between that, your experience, and the instructions on the container of spackle you don’t know how long it takes to dry??? If you don’t know how long it will take, then how can you possibly know you’d need to start an hour earlier to get done on time????
We did a first pass of spackle in the largest holes so that it could dry overnight and get them one step ahead.
They left just after 3pm, so if we had let them come in at 9am, they would have been done by 2pm. That is NOT a good enough reason to get up early.
Guess who isn’t getting a 5* review from us (like I was anticipating based on their work in our building)? They are going to have to work very hard to keep from getting a 2* review.
5* to start -1* for forgetting our paint colors -1* for the date chaos -1* for the time changes +1* for a darn good job of fixing a piece of trim I broke when we moved in -1* for bitching about us to our building manager; WTF dude? Fucking Morning Lark with no respect for Night Owls. = 2*
We are being polite and not leaving a review. Of course the reason I know he complained is because the building manager asked us to write them a review. Trust me, y’all, he doesn’t really want one.