The First Mistakes

When a guy, even a competent-looking-and-sounding guy with good references, tells you that he can do it all himself (framing, plumbing, electrical, windows, doors, walls, ...), put a big question mark down somewhere before you make a decision. The first and the biggest mistake we made in this project was that we hired the wrong person to do the job. This guy turned out to be just a handy man. He came with 2 impeccable references.

He has done some small jobs for a good friend of ours, and lots of work for a friend of a friend, a real estate investor, who had worked with the guy for over 10 years. Our real estate investor gave high regard to the man's work, on remodeling jobs big and small, complex or simple, and on the quality of his work. And, of course, the quote (the estimate) for the job was good. So he got the job.

Daddy wasn't sure if this guy could handle the job at its planned scope (i.e, its scale and complexity), and asked him to do the kitchen first. But it was rejected as an all-or-none deal. I was not sure what daddy was thinking at the time, for he had always been working with licensed contractors only, for plumbing and electrical jobs, in the past 20 years or so while taking care of our old houses.

The first week -- three people came in to tear down the existing walls, closets, kitchen cabinets, and everything in the bathrooms. They made swift progress demolishing the old house. They dumped everything into a big dumpster. A 1-year old Maytag dishwasher was also thrown into the dumpster, when Daddy was on a business trip in DC. Over that weekend, daddy jumped into the dumpster to retrieve the poor little dishwasher from under a heavy pile of debris himself. When the dumpster was hauled away a week later, apot hole was left on the edge of the driveway by the metal wheels (see new driveway patching material later).


We used to have two closets in the entry area that separated the living room and the bedrooms. Daddy decided to tear down the closets to make the entry a bit more open and spacious. The separation wall was taken out when the closets were removed. The "openness" was a bit daunting, because one could look directly into the hallway of bed and baths from the living room. And, of course, adding the wall back was a bit problematic. We had a lively discussion on how to separate the living room from the entry area. We went through the ideas of adding a book case, a portable separator, like the Chinese-style wood panels, a wall with glass bricks, etc., before settling back to the good old solid wall. Then we had a debate on how wide it should be, 3 ft, 4 ft, or 6ft (the original length of the wall)? The change from 4ft to 6ft after it was built cost $500 extra, along with some difficult negotiation with our guy.


But the reason why it was a mistake to hire this guy in the first place was not so obvious until the kitchen cabinets and countertops were installed, with several quite visible and serious mistakes (validated by our cabinet vendor later). So he quit, after we learned the painful truth that the kitchen job was in trouble and the other jobs were uncertain too, when it was 8 weeks into the project (2 weeks overdue from the original 6 weeks project schedule). The reality of other costly mistakes unfolded itself later when the plumbing underneath was examined by 2 licensed plumbers and the new windows were stress-tested by the jet-stream water of our stucco painter (each topic will be written up later). Henceforth the work done by this guy was properly labeled "Bad Labor" in our spreadsheet.