Day 117-121

When the end is near it seems that everything is going in slow motion. As of right now neither the drywall or exterior paint is done. The drywall gets its primer coat Monday (day 122) and texture coat Tuesday, and then it will be done. The exterior paint probably won’t be finished until the end of the week. The good news on the paint is that the painters have been thoroughly preparing the exterior, so the end result should be impressive. They even worked on Saturday.

Friday (day 119) the garage doors were installed. We can’t believe they’re finally here. Of course, like everything else, they’re not done. Since we don’t have electricity yet they didn’t install the garage door opener. I need to make sure David remembers to call them back to take care of that. Once everyone leaves then we’ll also stain the doors.

On the drywall front: three odd things. 1) There’s an area that hasn’t been taped floated. It’s about three feet long and we cannot for the life of us figure out why it wasn’t taped/floated and why it wasn’t completely obvious to the drywaller. David marked areas that needed work, so hopefully this will be taken care of. 2) They drywalled over some wiring in the ceiling. This is odd all the way around because we have no idea what the wiring was for (maybe a smoke alarm?) and why they would drywall over it. We have to make sure that we don’t have live wires loose in the attic. 3) Lazaro left some of the baseboard trim on before drywalling started. Now they’re going to have to spend time making sure they do the trim right instead of just tacking it up over the drywall.

Sunday (day 121) Brad and I primed the garage bay walls. We had asked David if this was OK and he said to go ahead with it. At least that’s one thing out of the way. We can’t decide if we’re going to take the time to paint it or not. Right now we’re leaning towards not painting it. It should probably be done, but we have a lot of painting in our future and the garage bay walls are not high on our list of things to paint.

Day 111-116

On day 111 the drywallers finished tacking the drywall up. David called for a drywall inspection before taping and floating began (the city has to make sure enough screws are used—aka making more money). We failed. We failed miserably because David doesn’t know the new city construction codes. He had told us we didn’t need to drywall the walls of the garage bays. We thought this would be a good way to save $1000 right now and that eventually we’d put the drywall up ourselves (if we decided we needed it). We also failed because the wrong material was used at the tub surround—and the cabinet next to the tub wall wasn’t covered with anything (dummies). Apparently greenboard isn’t supposed to be used under tile anymore. After researching it online I can't believe a drywall company would actually install it in a tub/shower.

David seemed really angry about the failed inspection. If I’ve learned anything from working with him, his anger is usually a sign that he knows he messed up. This lack of knowledge threw us off schedule by a little over three working days. When you’re in the home stretch that feels like weeks! The kicker is that he didn’t even come to the site to see the failed inspection. He called me and asked me what it said. Looking back on it I should have told him to come over and read it for himself. It’s not that I minded telling him what the inspection said, but I did mind that he wasn't coming to the site to inspect the problem.

David said he’d go down to the city offices and fight the failed inspection. He said he just finished a garage before our project and wasn’t required to drywall the bay walls. And then he added that they might have begun the project before the new codes were released, so they might not have pertained to that project. Duh. Since David charges us for time spent waiting around at the city offices we made the decision to just suck it up and pay for the drywall. We also chose to do that simply because we didn’t want to add any more time to the project.

While all of this was going on we also got the exterior paint bid. Ouch. However, we expected a higher than usual bid because our friend who used the same painters told us they’re expensive but worth every penny. A part of me thought about getting another bid and then I thought about time. I just want this thing done, so time is outweighing money right now. The longer I work with David the closer I get to losing it. I’ll pay thousands to get rid of him.

And that brings me to another David story. This one deals with whether or not we should paint the stucco. We originally chose stucco because we love the natural look of it. We had been given the choice to add a tint to it and we chose not to. When the stucco job was done, Red (the stucco guy) told us we should paint the stucco to protect it. This made us sad, but I found paint that seemed to match. We just wouldn’t have that uneven, natural look we were going for. Then David threw us for a loop and said we shouldn’t paint the stucco because of the Tyvek moisture barrier under it. He said if we sealed the exterior with paint the Tyvek wouldn’t breathe properly and moisture could get trapped. He then asked why we didn’t pick one of the tints Red offered if we were going to paint the stucco. I said because no one told us a tint would offer any protection. Then he said he told us as much and I firmly told him he did not, and why would we choose to paint when a tint would have been cheaper? He then said we shouldn’t paint the stucco because the Tyvek representative advised against it.

Thanks to David, Brad spent part of his morning calling paint suppliers and the Tyvek people to try to figure out what we should do. About half said to paint the stucco and the other half said we shouldn’t. Our decision? We’re not going to paint right now, and if in a few years we see any deterioration in the stucco we’re going to paint then. On another note, we don’t even know if the tint for the stucco would have offered any protection. We definitely don’t think David knows.

On a positive note we have all of the paint picked out (for the non-stucco areas) and the painters started prepping. We’re supposed to get rain this week, so my guess is the exterior won’t be finished before the weekend.