We posted about a month ago that we had gotten a bid from Macky, our general contractor, about redoing the plaster around the base of the house in the courtyard. It’s especially bad near the front door where the water bounces off the stairs and onto the wall. Our basic guess is that they redid the plaster a while back with the wrong materials which is causing everything to come down now. We’ve talked about using old bricks or exposing the ones under there now…but since we’re not planning to do the entire base of the house right now, we figure we better just make the basic repairs, leaving everything as it is optically and then make decisions later on about upgrades and such.
This isn’t a very good picture but the only one I have at the moment really showing the damage.
As you can see, the pink colored stuff is the real problem area and parts of it are already falling off. But Macky is also going to replace the rest of the stuff about half way up the main wall because that is also damaged. The problem is that the pink part is set out further from the wall than everything else…so the rain hits the ledge and bounces back up onto the wall. The wall was constructed with the wrong stuff to start with so it’s not holding up well…
Macky told us he would be starting the project the week after Easter. That week has come and gone and he’s not started. Several of hubby’s work colleagues are also still working with him with more urgent time frames…and they were really going crazy when they couldn’t find him. One of our biggest pet peeves about Macky is that he never calls if he’s going to be late or can’t make it to work for whatever reason. You expect him to be on the job at a certain time, like always, and he just never shows. Then you need to track him down yourself to find out what’s going on. If he’s sick, has a meeting in court, a death in the family, an emergency in Croatia (where he’s from) or just needs to go get some materials before heading to your place, you have to drag the information from him. I know we have mentioned this little character trait before but it’s not getting any better.
So the current story is that Macky had kidney failure and he’s going to be in the hospital for a couple of weeks. I don’t want to doubt the guy but it seems that many of the people he works with end up with some strange illnesses all the sudden. We don’t completely doubt that he’s not ill, he seems to barely drink anything all day and works like a horse…but it just tends to happen at times that are not all that convenient for his customers and rather convenient for himself. For example, now, the week after Easter when we have temps in the 80s for the first time this year…I can’t blame him for wanting to take some time off either but come on.
Another example of mysterious illness: he told us he was going to bring over a guy to clean out our heater system and finally get everything working properly. He’s been telling us this since January. But then the guy suddenly went into the hospital for some grave yet vague illness for weeks and now he’s so backed up he can’t get to us…hmmmm. Why, you ask, do we continue to wait for Macky to bring the guy out? Well, Macky installed a few new heaters for us here plus he’s tried to fix some of the heater problems himself. Since the problem is mostly his fault at the moment, we want him to take it all on and he can at least explain what he’s done already. Thankfully it’s warm again outside but during the first few weeks it was a huge problem.
We’ve also experienced illnesses by his brother (who really did seem to have a nasty cold for a while), himself and various other people who’ve worked for him. Perhaps it’s an excuse they make when they need time off…but he either needs to start budgeting his time better, get more guys on his crew or start eating healthier…because this is just ridiculous.
