Its been 6 weeks!
From the time the man started on the stairs until the time he left my house with all his tools, it was 6 weeks. It was meant to take 3 days.
The guy we hired to do the work is a great guy. He knows what he’s doing. His work is really good. He’s ‘going it’ by himself. He has a family to support.
I am a sucker for people who try and make it on their own. The competition between the small guy and the big corporations is absurd and many of the ‘mom and pop’ stores and businesses are folding like yesterday’s newspaper because of it. Here today. Gone tomorrow.
These guys are struggling to keep their heads above water (or timber in this case) and I’m here to help…or to get suckered in.
My stair/flooring guy had a few issues and obstacles while doing our floors and stairs.
First of all, he had ordered the wood last April because that is when we first started talking about redoing our floors and stairs. When he went to fetch the wood in October, he hadn’t called it in the week before so they didn’t have the order ready. After all, it had been 7 months from when he’d ordered the wood to when he went to pick it up. That was a 2-day delay.
But the floors got done in 2 days with the help of one of his buddies who has his own wood flooring business.
Then the snow fell and he couldn’t get to our house to start on the stairs.
The next week he went to fetch the wood for the stairs and once again, he hadn’t called it in the week before so they didn’t have the order ready. That left us with another few days of waiting.
Finally, he got the stairs, put them in but they had to be sanded and touched up over 2 days. Then came the nightmare with the underside of the stairs and you can read about it here.
Once again, snow set in and then it was Christmas and New Years.
The guy didn’t show up for days even after he confirmed he’d be over to complete the job many times via text messages. I was frustrated!
Then, just as I was about to chew him out about not getting the job done, in one of his text messages he told me his wife had a double mastectomy last summer and was having issues. The doctors thought she had leukemia. My stair/flooring guy was a mess emotionally. I completely understood!
A week went by and he finally came by to do a bit of touch up work and a bit of sanding. While he was working on my stairs he got a call from his wife who let him know that the test results had come back negative and all she had was an infection. What a relief!
Then he disappeared on me for another week. When I finally got in touch with him again he told me his truck broke down and it cost him $900 to repair. I completely understood. But I was getting impatient!
Another week went by and Warren started thinking about legal action and on the last day before Warren was going to confront him, he came by, worked for 5 hours and got the job finished. He never knew about the thoughts of legal action.
I have a few more gray hairs now. But I am happy with my stairs. Finally!!
