Going Up, Growing Up: March 2012

Work has been moving along very, very slowly. We still have big gaps in our roof because they have not found roof tiles yet and I'm pretty sure they have not been looking. Every time it rains I fear the worst and every ceiling that can be damaged has been damaged to varying degrees (replace the rooms whole ceiling to touch ups only).

On Wednesday the rain came in and ran down our passage walls. That was the last straw for me, I was fully determined to get up on Thursday morning and give the manager a piece of my mind. However on Thursday morning said manager woke up on the wrong side of the bed and called his workmen at 8:30 (once they had already changed and started work) and told them he was closing down our site. What!!

So after calling my husband who then called said manager and they had a 'conversation' which ended with the guys staying on site and doing just about nothing all day. Why would he decide to shut down our site? Well the answers were vague but you can be sure it had to do with pettiness and money that we had already agreed (the week before) to pay the next day.

Here's the short version of what we are pretty sure happened:
1. In the middle of February they raised an invoice for the structure (implying that they had met this milestone and wanted to be paid). In the course of the next day our son broke his leg.
2. We agreed to pay in the next two weeks which is when the bank had promised our new bond would be ready to draw from.
3. Half way through the week our kitchen ceiling is damaged by the deluge and Super dad goes into the roof to control the flow of water. When he's there he discovers that huge parts of the A frames and roof timbers have not been finished. He contacts the manager and says we won't be paying for the structure until its completed. All of a sudden the structure miraculously starts getting finished.
4. The next week we meet the manager to choose windows and he calls Super dad pedantic for not paying and saying the structure is not yet complete.....'look how much other work we've done' he says. 'Yes,' Super dad says 'but I'm only going to pay for the framework when the framework is done'.
5. They agree that seeing as it is mostly done we will pay over half and then the rest the next week Friday as the bank has also been stringing us along and we will only have the money then.
6. The manager wakes up on the wrong side of the bed and decides he wants to be paid. So he pulls his guys off site even though he has agreed with the fact that we will pay him the next day. Very mature and professional.

So Super dad reminds him of the agreement and all of a sudden the builders are not leaving the site and everything is hunky dory again. So very strange and irritating. When Super dad phoned the next day (after we had paid) to clear the air everything was sunshine and rainbows again and the excuse for trying to 'shut our site down' ...... they were waiting for their supplier who did not have stock of a larger size of timber beam which they apparently needed before they could continue.

Wow I really wish builder/contractors were a little more honest and mature. So in the end they did not work on Friday or Monday while they waited for the delivery of the new materials.

One great thing that did happen was that they moved the geyser up into its new position and the plumber, Jeff, is a fantastic guy. He listened to all my concerns about the water pressure and agreed to put the geyser into the new roof rather than simply move it along inside the existing roof. He also agreed to put the geyser over the children's loo rather than over a bedroom as I pointed out that if it ever burst I did not want it to ruin the bedrooms. After moving the geyser our pitiful shower (which has been terrible since we moved in) got even worse and so we called Jeff back in the hopes he could figure out how to fix it. He did!! He was the first plumber to look at the shower and suggest that the hot tap might be broken rather than suggesting there was some massive problem with the pressure or pipes. So on Saturday he arrived and changed the shower arm, head and taps and now the hot water pressure is wonderful. We were so excited we had a shower that very evening. Best R300 we ever spent.