Funmurphys: the Blog

Home Improvement: And So It Begins

Thursday we got a good news/bad news call about our home improvement projects. The good news was, they moved up our start date to Friday for the room addition, the bad news was they moved back our bathroom start date by a week. So I took Friday off so I could move the plants that were where the addition was going, and to get ready for the cub scout pack campout the following day. The builders came by, looked around, said piece of cake, and left. A fire inspector came by and said we didn't have a fire district permit. When I called the builder they said we did. Don't you just love bureaucracy in action - I wonder how much I'm paying for filling out all the permit paperwork.

Monday, they showed up, marked the underground cable and electric lines with spray paint, and demolished half the deck - the foreman told my wife that while using screws instead of nail is what he would have done, it made tearing the deck apart much harder. Tuesday they showed up, knocked down more of my fence than they told me, tore out the rest of the deck, dug and poured the footings, and tore up far more of my back yard than I expected. The hard clay - we've had a very dry summer/fall this year - defeated the first backhoe, pulling it into the trench when they tried to dig the footings. They had to get a bigger one to haul the first one out and finish digging. They poured concrete in the afternoon, so now I have a rectangle of concrete in a field of dirt for a back yard.

They also accidentally cut the cable line. So they had to call the cable company, who came out amazingly fast (my wife figures they must have "pull"). When my wife found out, she told the foreman that she was upset because she was going to miss Trading Spaces. The foreman told her how much he loved the show and that he got to meet Ty when Trading Spaces was filming shows here recently.

As many as the screw ups were, it is going smoother than any of the episodes of Dream Home I've seen.