First Impressions and Contactors

Every interaction I've had with contractors have not been pleasant.

One neighbor had a team of guys working on our shared fence. They showed up at 6 am for 10 straight days and started hammering and drilling. They set up their saw horses and housed all the lumber in our yard. They ruined parts of our yard.

That same neighbor got a new porch poured not long after. Guess where the cement truck was parked while it rained? That's right, on our yard. The truck slide a good 3 feet during this pouring, destroying the grass and making huge dips and lumps that I've attempted to even out multiple times, but they somehow remain.

The other neighbor had roofers show up. They plugged their power tools into my outdoor outlets, threw tons of discarded roof tiles into my yard, threw cigarettes into my yard, and even left a stained smelly shirt hanging on my porch.

So when it came time to hire our first workers to cut down the tree in our back yard, I was incredibly stressed. I was pissed off when things happened to me, and I would guess the neighbors would feel the same when it was flipped back.

Of course the tree guys let huge logs fall three stories into both my yard and the neighbors yard creating huge divots that still remain. I've dumped a good 30 lbs of dirt into holes (of course fixing the neighbor's yard first) trying to get things fixed. It still is not right.

We had a storm roll through a few weeks back that completely ripped the roof off of our house. Around this same time, we got a new neighbor next door.

He came up to me on the fence line and introduced himself. We had a quick pleasant conversation. I was happy to have a new start.

Well, the roofers have showered his house in pieces of brick, mortar, and tar paper. The dumpster guys ripped a huge steel pipe off of our curb and there's a good six inches sticking straight out in the street ready to ruin someone's wheel. And now I'm the proud owner of a dead side yard because a tarp covered in trash sat for 8 days.

This morning, I was baking bread, trying to quickly mow the lawn, and clean up trash left behind and I was interrupted every 12 minutes by my new neighbor, who was justifiably upset every time he found something new wrong. Instead of spending 90 minutes getting everything done, this was stretched into more than 2 hours as I attempted to call the street department, the insurance adjuster, and the roofer, none of which are answering because it's the weekend.

I can understand the contractor's side. You're doing 12 hours of work a day, in the elements, for maybe $30,000 a year. Your body is breaking down, you have no retirement, and you do the same back breaking jobs 6 days a week. At a certain point, you stop caring.

But dammit, there's also the being considerate side of things. I go out of my way to be considerate to everyone that deserves it. And that is probably why I care so much about this.

Thanks for sitting in on this therapy session.