Chaos and Creation in the Basement

Some of you know the story of our remodeling nightmare. Some don’t. So here it is, finally posted on the day that the whole thing is actually supposed to be finished.

Last October, we began remodeling our house. We left for a cruise on the first of October and the workers started while we were gone. The job included stripping and re-finishing the floors in our living room / dining room, adding crown molding to every room and a pretty serious remodeling of the kitchen. There were a few other things but they were really minor. The whole project was supposed to have been finished by the end of October as we were planning on having Thanksgiving dinner at our house.

The contractors, led by a guy named Bill, did the floors while we were gone (or, actually, had them done by a subcontractor). The rest of the project stretched on and on, missing the end of October deadline. When Thanksgiving came around, we had no kitchen. No appliances were hooked up and the kitchen was a wreck. This was a condition we lived with for about a month. Christie was, understandably, upset. And still the work went on.

After much yelling by Christie, Bill and his guys managed to finish most of the work the week before Christmas. There were a few minor things they never bothered to finish (no thresholds in the den) and a few things they screwed up and didn’t fix (we still can’t shut the door between our den and hallway and the kitchen sink was leaking) but it was all relatively minor stuff and we were able to host Christmas festivities at our house.

Then…

In early January, my boss, Mike, came in to work with a guy who had been working on the bathroom at Mike and Jinger’s new house. This guy, David, said he could give me an estimate on turning our unfinished basement into a large den, office, laundry room, storage closet and bathroom. So he came over and gave us an estimate and a list of references. He even came back with a written estimate and a very detailed plan.

We got some other estimates and we checked David’s references. He wasn’t licensed, bonded, insured or any of that but his price was about the same as all the others, he was the only one to give us such great detail about his plan, and he could start right away. In addition, he asked us how early he could be there every day. He said he liked to put in ten, twelve or even fourteen hour days. That sounded great to us so, on January 9th of this year (probably less than three weeks after the completion of the upstairs work), we wrote a fairly large check to cover the first batch of supplies and first bit of labor. The project was supposed to take six to eight weeks so we bought some new furniture and scheduled it for delivery the last week of February. We even began to plan for a party in mid to late March to show off all the new work.

We wrote the check on a Sunday, I think. On Monday morning, before I had even gotten to work (but I was probably running late (I usually am)), David called and said that our bank wouldn’t cash the check. Well, of course not. Since we had just decided over the weekend to hire him and he was really eager to start, the money we’d transferred into the account to cover the check hadn’t gone through. We had expected him to deposit the check into his account and use his credit card to buy the supplies. And that’s when things started to go wrong.

According to David, his checking account was new and he didn’t have checks or a check card yet. He was going to pay for all the supplies with cash. That’s fine, we said. Just bring us the receipts. He kept asking if there was someway we could get him a bit of his “draw” so he could get started but I told him that we didn’t have money in other accounts to cover that.

So, Tuesday, he bought a bunch of supplies from Lowe’s (which, for some odd reason, he always calls “Lowel’s”, with an extra L) and had them delivered on Wednesday.

I’m a little fuzzy on the timeline here because so much has gone wrong but I think it was that Wednesday that he said he had to find a new place to live because his girlfriend had kicked him out. He said, “She’s very vindictive and I’m going to have to get a restraining order. Don’t worry, though. I don’t think she knows where your house is.”

What?!!! What the fuck, dude?! We’re supposed to be worried about your girlfriend now?! Holy shit.

But she never burned our house or anything and life went on. David got a new place to live and began preparing to actually work on the house. Then he disappeared.

We didn’t see him for a day or two and the never fun process of panicking began. He finally called one night while we were out to dinner at Amigo but he sounded drunk or something. He said he was in the hospital then hung up. We promptly began the process of shitting bricks and throwing up. By the next morning, we were in Full Oh-My-God-We’re-Fucked Panic Mode.

Finally, David called and, in a more coherent voice, said that his blood pressure had spiked to some unholy level and “She” had taken him to the hospital but they had him on new medicine and he was feeling better.

On a side note, “She” is Tracy (I’m guessing at the spelling and I don’t know her last name). He almost never referred to her as anything else. Given the way he pronounced “Lowe’s”, I wonder if that was even her real name. Though, at the time of his hospitalization, we didn’t know that “She” was the same “She” he had been dating when he was working on Mike’s house. This confused us because we didn’t know if he was living with another girl and dating her or what. We wanted to ask but, more than anything, we wanted him to finish and get the fuck out.

And here’s another side note. David, as it turns out, was free to do this sort of work because he was on disability for a heart problem. About six months earlier, he had had heart surgery and, when the doctors put his chest back together, they did it wrong so he has a weird abscess that has to be drained periodically and he’s in constant pain. His medical problems would prove to be a huge problem for us as well.

So David was out of the hospital and feeling… different. He was sweating like George W. Bush on Jeopardy and shaking like Dan Quayle at a spelling bee. He looked like shit but, since we were about a month in and nothing had been done, we didn’t really care too much. Then he started asking for more money.

He said that, because of moving expenses and unexpected medical bills, he had already spent most of the huge advance we gave him. He tried to convince us that he couldn’t get his medicine until he had paid for his hospital stay. We knew this was bullshit but what could we do? We decided to just pay him the rest of his labor cost up front and not give him anything on completion.

We should have just eaten the loss and dumped him then as this was only the beginning of a disturbing and draining cycle.

He would show up sometime in the morning (never early) with Her/Tracy and work for two or three hours--maybe five or six if he really needed money. He’d work a bit and demonstrate just enough progress to keep us paying for supplies. Then he’d disappear for days at a time with only minimal contact. Every week or so, he would task for more money and, after enough badgering, we’d give in because, by that point, we were in too deep and only getting in deeper.

I could write several thousand more words about this Iowan Dipshit but, after more than eight months of living amid the chaos of construction, I just don’t feel like it. So, in the words of Inigo Montoya, “Let me explain. No. There is too much. Let me sum up.”

1. David never once worked the 10-14 days he promised. In fact, in the full four months that he worked for us, he never did a full forty hour week.

2. He smoked in the basement. Christie hates smoke in the house with the same passion as all former smokers.

3. We gave him our Lowe’s card so that he could buy supplies and we’d have a record of what he bought since he only rarely brought us receipts. He used our card to buy tools. This should have come out of his end, not our materials expenses. When he left, he left behind a couple of small things but I’m sure it wasn’t all we’d paid for.

4. One day, when he didn’t come in, he said he had been in court because a game warden had caught him with an under-sized bass. Yeah, right.

5. We got a call from the bank one day to approve his cashing of a check since he had an out-of-state (Iowa) driver’s license. He hadn’t always been using the Iowa license. He had been using a Tennessee license but he said he “lost” his license, strongly implying that he misplaced it, not that it had been taken from him by a guy in a black robe.

6. He drank the Cokes we kept in the downstairs fridge.

7. “She” bought flowers using our Lowe’s card (she didn’t call it “Lowel’s”) and kept them in our downstairs fridge where the cokes used to be.

8. He was always telling us how broke he was an how he needed an advance but then he told us how they paid several hundred dollars for a pit bull that came “from a line of champions”.

9. He missed a few days because his pain specialist had him on Methadone and, when David found out what it was, he decided to take himself off it. (For the record, I don’t believe any of that.)

10. We bought furniture and carpet right after we hired David and arranged delivery for late February or early March. We obviously had to reschedule. David gave us a new completion date so we added a week or two and rescheduled. We missed that deadline and another. We finally had to have the furniture delivered and shoved into my office. The carpet was just delivered today.

11. Okay, this one probably isn’t David’s fault but, because of all the sheetrock sanding, everything in our house, upstairs and downstairs, is covered in a thin layer of white dust.

12. And speaking of sheetrock… This is typical David. He would put up a bit of the sheetrock mud and then take two or three days off for it to dry. Apparently, he couldn’t be doing plumbing or wiring or anything else at all while the stuff was drying. He was not a multitasker, even when one or more of the tasks were essentially just waiting.

13. After dealing with his constant lies about how much he was working, we got a webcam and installed it in the basement. It pissed him off but at least we were able to cut down on the lies about how much he'd been working. When my new office is finished and furnished, the webcam will become the Opus Cam. You'll be able to log in any time of day and watch the world's cutest Chihuahua sleep.

14. He… Oh, fuck it. He screwed us royally and got away with it. We can’t file criminal charges because, technically, it’s illegal to use an unlicensed contractor and, even if we sued him civil court (we did have a written contract and a couple months worth of Lowe’s records), we’d never get anything out of him because he had nothing and could disappear pretty easily.

So, finally, in early May, we fired him and found someone else. The new guy was licensed, bonded, insured and had done a lot of work for Christie’s friend, Whit. It was going to cost us a lot more to finish but he said he could get it all done in two or three weeks. The only problem was, he couldn’t start for two or three weeks.

So we waited… And, while we were waiting, Satan sent a flood.

One Friday May morning at about 7:15, Christie got out of the shower and went to the living room. I was just waking up because I had to be at work early but I was still in bed and not fully awake. Christie came back into the bedroom and said, "We have a huge problem."

At some point in the night (probably not long after we went to bed at about 11:00), the filter for our fridge's icemaker ruptured. There was a pool of very clean and quite cool water, about an inch deep, which covered most of our kitchen floor. We used every towel in our house to soak up the water then we wrung out some of the towels and used them again but still couldn't get it really dry. We did get enough of the water up to see that the new (about six months old) wood laminate floor was already bubbled and warped. And then...

I went downstairs and HOLY SHIT! There was a massive pool of water in our basement and water was coming pretty fast through the sheetrock ceiling. It was dripping out of light fixtures and running down the wall near the backyard. The only good thing about it was that, thanks to David’s incompetence and slothfulness, nothing down there had been painted and the carpet and furniture were yet in place.

I took the day off to meet with contractors and repairmen and emergency cleanup crews. The insurance people sent an "emergency clean up crew" up from Rome to suck up all the water and try to prevent any further damage. They had to rip out a huge L-shaped chunk of our new ceiling in the basement and install a series of industrial strength fans and dehumidifiers which had to run constantly for four days. They also had to rip up about two feet of the carpet in the den and remove the pad because, apparently, the pad, once soaked, will never dry.

The clean up crew was supposed to be back on Tuesday but it was Thursday before they got there. They had to rip up the kitchen floor and, when they did, they found there was still water under there. So the fans and dehumidifier had to stay until the weekend. Christie is very sensitive to noise so this did not make her happy. And, when Christie is unhappy, I’m unhappy.

After everything was fixed, we actually ended up with a much nicer floor because Connie and Whit gave us some leftover hardwood from their recent remodel and it looks really great. The really crappy part was that, with the flooding, the drying out and the new floor, there was about three weeks where we had no usable kitchen and our stove and refrigerator were in the upstairs den (which is very small). Now, while I think a urinal in the den is a great idea, I wasn’t thrilled to have my view of the TV blocked by refrigerator magnets and the fridge to which they were attached.

So now all that’s done and everything is in place… Almost. Since I started this entry (I started it at about 9:00am and it’s now 9:38pm), the carpet installer guys showed up but they couldn’t put it in today because there were still some spots in the floor that needed to be filled in or else the carpet would stretch and sag and wrinkle and, apparently, end life as we know it.

So we wait again. There is still a leaky sink to be fixed and carpet to be installed and a few little things to be touched up but it’s almost there. We can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. And, now, the light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a speeding freight train. Today, the light at the end of the tunnel is a 50” plasma HDTV.