Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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As the Apple Turns
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Capitalist Lion
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Tal G in Jerusalem
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12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Tuesday, May 13, 2003
10:57 - Next time with pictures	(top)
Time for another one of those interesting-only-to-Brian posts, I think. For the past several days, and over the weekend in particular, we've been in drywall hell. Not the actual doing of drywall, mind you; just trying to find a drywall contractor who will answer his bloody phone. See, the new master suite has a new arch wall about 1/3 of the way down its length; this needs to be fully drywalled along the lower part, below waist level, and then the columns and arches need to be clad in drywall and made nice and flush. Then there's the old wall that we removed, which used to divide the two small bedrooms from each other; that left long strips of bare wall and ceiling that have to be patched. We also removed the two closets, which means there are more strips of non-drywall to replace, in L-shapes on the ceilings and then down to the floor. And then there's the new bathroom passthru door we put in, which needs to be surrounded with drywall; the ductwork has been clad in MDF, and it needs drywall; and the old bedroom door that we removed needs to be drywalled over, too. And then there are about a dozen little holes and divots and cuts and miscellaneous punch-throughs that have to be filled in somehow, either with lots of spackle or with actual drywall patches. Not exactly a weekend's work, I know. But hey, we're stupid, so we thought we'd just buy the drywall and go to it. Well... that didn't work out too well. Drywall's more complicated than just tacking some strips up and knifing putty into the cracks. The more we got into it (which is to say, not very far), the more we realized that the only way to go about this was going to be to have a professional come in. Easier said than done, however. I spent the past week phoning every contractor in the area who came up in a yellow-pages search on "drywall" in Sherlock. I must have called nearly two dozen people. I talked to contractors, I talked to secretaries (wives), I talked to answering machines. Many said they only did large subcontract jobs for builders; they didn't do little piecemeal weird things like mine. So they were out. But among the remaining ones who did seem to be likely candidates-- care to guess how many returned my calls? Yup, zero. Cold round goose-egg. I don't know what it is with the state of drywall contracting around here, but it just doesn't seem conducive to people actually following up on jobs or anything. But at any rate, I figured the only thing for it would be to find one contractor that I liked, whose non-call-back at least seemed to be for the most innocuous of reasons, and to just hammer and hammer until I got him on-site. I could talk to his secretary/wife before noon most days, and she kept reassuring me that he'd get back to me, but he never did; after noon, I could call the same number back and get an answering machine, but the ingenous way it worked was as follows: Please leave a message after the beep. BEEP! ...You have reached so-and-so construction. For a directory by name, please press 8. ...Leaving me with little clear direction as to how I was meant to leave a message. But yesterday, through some miracle, I managed to get through to the real, live contractor around 2:00. Boy oh boy, I wasn't about to let him off the line now that he was in the net! I told him all about our previous missed appointments (last Wednesday, the first day I'd called, he said he'd come by the house-- but never showed, though we waited there until like 7:00) and about his weird-ass answering machine, and he apologized profusely and agreed to come out and look. And come out and look he did. After about twenty minutes of rubbing of chins and going "hmm", he said the job would likely cost us about $1800-2000. I suppose that's not as bad as it could be. Besides, he has a brand-new Avalanche with his logo on the door, so he must be good at what he does. (Yay, like my logic?) But after all this, I'm thinking that it's going to be a small price to pay to just get this all done, and done right. If it means just refacing the kitchen cabinets and not redoing the kitchen wholesale, which we'd been planning to do, well, so be it. We can still manage a nice granite countertop, and it won't look bad, certainly. So the next step is to get the room 100% finished and ready for drywalling, which means completing the arches and the header over the new door, and putting new wider trim pieces in where the old door was (so the drywall can drive into them without splitting them). And then maybe the following week we can paint, and then we can carpet, and then we can... move in?