A crappy day at the new house

One of the things that really pisses me off is rank stupidity, which we witnessed yesterday over and over at the new house. The contractor, whose general bumbling and lack of communication with other contractors has caused a lot of grief on this job, has me about to the melting point.

Warning: this story has some seriousWayne moments; those of you who know Wayne's bathroom stories and are grossed out by them should not continue reading. Wayne and others, you may continue reading. (Sorry, unlike the ultracool blog that Jase pens, I don't know the html or JavaScript or whatever it is he uses to roll up/roll down his stories.)

Yesterday's "fun" started when Jess went over to the house and gave me a progress call. Seems the contractor had been hard at work cutting down all the doors so that they would clear the carpet. But Mr. Dumbass didn't bother to read the PUNCH LIST, which would have told Mr. Idiot that he couldn't cut the bottom of the door more than 1/2". And you might think that with a $1,200 pair of leaded glass doors that Mr. F*ckwad might be just the teeniest bit careful but no, he would up cutting more off the bottom of the doors than the door construction permits. Fortunately for Mr. Sh!t-for-Brains, it didn't ruin the door, but there will have to be some patch up.

Oh, but that's not the best part. Mr. Dumbf*ck struck again in the basement, on a much bigger scale. You see, when Moosebrain did the demolition in the basement four months ago, he tore out a set of cabinetry with a sink. Now he knew this was a working sink when he did this demolition; keep that in mind. Once the demolition was finished, the plumbers came in to do work, and one of the things they did was to cut the wastepipe for the sink down to floor level.

Now, in the house construction process, the plumbers and the contractor did a lot of work, but somehow, no one seemed to ever address the wastepipe that was sitting there, cut to floor level at the back of the laundry room.

So about three weeks ago, the contractor was finishing up the last of the big jobs and one of those was putting tile down in the laundry room. He decided to stay late that night to finish it, so his chief priority was just getting the floor put down. He hadn't wanted to lay the floor in the first place, it hadn't been part of the original contract; we had added it on as we felt it necessary to do tile or linoleum in that area, and the carpet place's price to install the linoleum had been out of reason. He just wanted to get it out of his hair. In the process, he simply covered the pipe with tile and kept going,

Fast-forward back to last night: Jess starts up the washing machine to test it out, and much to his horror, at the first drain-out, raw sewage began creeping out from under the machine. Not surprisingly, the tile had popped off and the sewage was bubbling out of the pipe. The contractor quickly placed the blame on the plumber, who he said the plumber had told him that he didn't think the pipe went anywhere. Uh-huh. Asshole demolished the sink and cabinetry and KNEW where it went, so that was a load of crap (no pun intended). And the jackass ran upstairs, complaining that the smell was going to make him sick - uh huh. As usual, nothing is his fault. Just like the damage to the first floor tile floor wasn't his fault; the dent in the oven door wasn't his fault; the fact that the plumber placed the baseboard heat in the upstairs bathroom in a spot that made it impossible for one of the vanity drawers wasn't his fault (even though the vanity was purchased and he knew the measurements but had not bothered to tell the plumber the floor plan; I could go on and on. But the scary part is that other people we have talked to about all this have told us that, by usual standards, we have gotten off lucky. Funny, I don't consider our having to pay for contractor f*ck-ups getting off lucky.

Anyway, Jess picked up the chunks (gross!) and I mopped up, and the plumber came and roto-rootered the line and then capped the pipe. Of course, the plumber had to tell us horror stories of other clients; I suppose that he thought that would assuage our irritation. Not exactly. I wasn't planning on christening the house with a sewer shower.

It's all cleaned up now, but it just gives me the willies to think that raw sewage has been on my basement floor. Yes, we disinfected, we mopped, did all that...but I'm obssesive when it comes to this kind of stuff. I'm not gonna feel right about that floor for at least three or four more disinfecting mop-ups.