Day 1: Tim replaced the sheet vinyl in small laundry room. Me: "There's a bubble in the corner -…read morecan you fix that?" Tim: "It's behind the door, so no one will see it."
Day 2: Tim is 1/2 hr late, spends first several minutes yelling at me that I should have gotten 8 lb carpet pad, instead of rubber, calls me "silly", says my choice is "over-the-top ridiculous" and did I know how much this pad weighs? He dumps carpet roll several feet out into the street. Me: "The recycle truck will be here soon, can you move the carpet into the driveway?" Tim: "No, they can drive around it." He replaces carpet in the large upstairs master bedroom by first cutting pad into irregular squares and putting a zillion staples around the edges of each small piece. The floor looks like a patchwork quilt. I'm thinking - deliberate sabotage? All day long, he barks orders at me. Tim to me, yells: "MOVE YOUR CAR!" (in front of my husband... oops!) We had paid $1200 for professional painters to paint most of the top floor. When Tim finishes for the day, there are gouges in the woodwork in several places, a pea-sized hole in the bedroom wall, a gouge in the stairwell, scrapes and blackmarks all over the baseboards and some of the walls, and black, greasy fingerprints on every wall, handrail, windowsill, doorway and baseboard. I want to cry. We have a waterbed wall unit that we took down and moved and now needs to be put back up, so we have a place to sleep - there's nothing I can do at this point. Tim still needs to recarpet the rest of the upstairs. I ask my husband, can we please fire him? My husband: "I'll talk to him. Maybe, if I help him, Tim won't be so angry and won't do so much damage. He's probably upset that he's working by himself. We want this done as soon as possible." Me: "What about the painting? We don't have another $1200 to get it redone." My husband thinks about it, goes out and buys lots of brown paper and tape and then we spend about 3 hours papering the walls, leaving only the bottoms of the baseboards clear of paper/tape. Tim NEVER cleaned up his messes, so daily I would clean up dirt, grit and carpet fiber from the front door, down the hallway, through the living room and upstairs.
Day 3: Tim is 1/2 hr late, my husband has a talk with him and then, Tim to me: 'I'm sorry if you were offended by that one thing I said - you shouldn't take it personal. OK, we're all good then." Tim rips up carpet in hallway and I see him sweeping, but he doesn't seem to be getting all the dirt (there is a lot of it). Me: "Would you like to borrow our shop vac to get that up?" Tim: "No, that's too big a hassle. Sweeping is good enough." My husband, who had shoulder surgery some months ago, should not be doing this, but I see him lifting and carrying heavy things and helping Tim as much as possible. I bite my tongue. Tim is not as angry and offensive, so whatever my husband is doing is helping, but I see Tim cheerfully ripping paper off the walls in some spots - says it's in his way. I bite my tongue until it bleeds and I stay away from Tim.
Day 4: Tim texts he'll be late because his wife isn't well. He was supposed to finish today, but he can't. He manages just a few hours of work that day, which was appreciated. BUT, just before he runs out the door, he rips the carpet off the last area to finish, which is the staircase. I didn't realize what he had done until I see the stairs, full of staples, tack strips and lots of dirt. Me: "OMG - is he trying to kill us?! How are we supposed to walk up or down the stairs without ripping up our feet and/or falling down the stairs?! Also, we'll be tracking dirt and staples onto the new carpet or the downstairs floor!" We're old and I have a bad knee, so the risk of waking up in the middle of the night to go down for water and forgetting the condition of the stairs is very real. My husband spends the next hour or so pulling all the staples and cleaning the stairs properly, but the tack strips are still exposed all the way down the stairs. Nothing we can do about it. He makes a barricade to try to prevent accidents that night.
Day 5: I don't come out of the bedroom until after my husband tells me he's gone. The thought of seeing Tim makes me feel ill. My husband advises that Tim wanted to know why I didn't come down to personally show my appreciation for the carpet installation. I tell him he's joking, but he says no, he's not.
The carpet has a few small bubbles and I'm not sure how the top-of-the-line rubber pad will wear over so many staples and leftover grit from the previous carpet pad, but at least it's done. My husband is very sore - he should not have been doing all of that heavy lifting for Tim. Tim's prices are a lot less than his competitors. I should have remembered that you get what you pay for. If I had it to do over again, I would have paid more to hire his competitor. Hard to imagine them being worse.
