Macky, Robert and the Moroccan showed up at about 8 am this morning and immediately got to work on finishing what the painters started. They will be plastering the walls which were not finished outside the office as well as painting them…and removing the wallpaper in the entry way, then plastering and painting in there too. This way the entire main floor will be in top shape and we won’t need to do anything else to it for a while besides maybe paint it again if Ayla starts sliding down the walls like in the old house, leaving dirt all over as she goes. And in addition to that, they are also building a wall into the fachwerk beams which separate the office from the rest of the old dining room. And eventually a door will also be installed here so that room is completely separated from the house and if it starts to look a bit crazy in there, it’s not all that noticeable when the door is closed.
After 4 hours, they had progressed this far. The start of the wall is already in, they’ve filled the holes in the wall with plaster and are about to start painting. Good progress has also been made in the entry way where they have made a major dent in taking off the wallpaper already. I imagine they may even be able to put up the plaster in there today and if we’re really lucky, they could even paint it today although that may be stretching it….but Macky expected to have the former dining room finished up by the end of today and I think they will definitely accomplish that.
To say that they work faster than the painter is an understatement. Had we originally given the contract to Macky, there is little doubt that he would have finished everything in one week but we had him working on other things already so we weren’t really sure he would have time to accomplish this as well…and of course he’s told us he doesn’t like painting and things along that line all that much so we figured we wouldn’t bother him with it. These three guys will finish in one day what it took the painters 3 days to do. The moral of the story: be very wary of working with German contractors. So far, of the 4 contractors we’ve had, 2 have been German and gotten themselves fired…and 2 have been Croatian and we will continue to use them long into the future. Not only do they do the work for a great price but they are clean, fast and absolutely know what they are doing.
