This has been a busy week for contractors. The painters were here Tuesday through today, painting the main living spaces downstairs (not the kitchen), our bedroom, and the baby’s room, a plumber came Tuesday to fix the leaking kitchen sink (and a few other things while he was here), and the yard people came today (just left), and WOW what a difference having work done makes. I mean, hello, that’s obvious, but it’s so nice to see the changes. We can walk out the back door without being attacked by bushes and trees, we can see whole flower beds we didn’t know we had, and we can see much of the low stone wall around the front of the house. I can’t wait until those guys come back. Too bad I don’t know when that will be – they have a couple of jobs to take care of next week, and everything else in the schedule is weather-dependent. The guy in charge (Dana) definitely understands what we’re after, though, which means we are completely comfortable letting him loose.
I was not that comfortable with our lead painter after a day or two. We had to ask for another coat of paint over the section of wall downstairs where the chalkboard paint had been because we could still the difference between that part of the wall and parts next to it, and then yesterday, he messed up one of the bedroom walls. In the master, we wanted the two walls with windows to be dark blue and the two without windows to be a lighter blue. I even diagrammed the room and included that, and he had that diagram on his phone. So yesterday, I went in to take a look and I found that one wall of each color was the wrong color. His excuse was that the day before, I had said I wanted to the two lighter walls (the room was already two colors) to be the darker blue and the two darker walls to be the light blue. First of all, I said no such thing. Second of all, when you come in to start painting and you realize that you have conflicting instructions from the homeowner, wouldn’t you check one more time to be sure? Anyway, he fixed it, but he didn’t seem happy about it, which annoyed me even more.
What he’ll never know, because we’ll never tell him, is that now that we’ve had a day to live with the room in two colors, we think we like the darker color MUCH better, and we’ll probably make all four walls that color ourselves. He doesn’t need to know that. Besides, I got the impression that he’s as glad to be done with this job as we are to have him not in the house anymore. Three and a half days of strangers in the house all the time was way too much.