You know those 10 days we had to get our long remodeling list done before moving? Yeah, that didn’t happen.
We all knew it wouldn’t. But my mantra of, “Paint and floors. Paint and floors. Just complete the paint and floors” continued. We had accepted that we would be moving into construction. Not the ideal way you want to move into a new house, but we had no other choice.
Thanks to the particulars of escrow and the mountains of paperwork required be completed in a timely manner, we closed a day later than we thought. This, of course, threw us into an instant panic. All of the contractors were scheduled to show up at the new house at 9AM on the 7th, the day after we had been set to close. The last thing we wanted to do was reschedule and, God forbid, lose a day or two on our already tight schedule. We had carefully orchestrated the contractors’ schedules so that they would be working on top of each other in order for everything to be done on time.
“Rescheduling is not an option!” I screamed to no one in particular.
Contractors, I discovered, don’t like having to work with other contractors. They like to come in, with only their crew, do their job, and leave. But we had too much to accomplish in a seriously small window of time to allow for that. Painters would have to be doing their prep work upstairs while other workers were busting up 2,000 square feet of tile downstairs. Workers would be doing demolition in the master bath while other workers were gutting the utility room. I don’t think most HGTV shows even make their contractors deal with this kind of chaos.
(Almost all of the contractors and workers spoke both English and Spanish, and when they spoke to one another in Spanish I’m fairly certain they were cussing about me us and my our crazy ideas and demands.)
Luckily for us, the escrow gods smiled down on us and the papers were filed first thing in the morning, allowing us to move forward with our demo as scheduled. We raced over to the house as soon as we got the call, at 8:45AM, giving me 15 minutes to take before pics.
