Whoa, Nellie!

Things have been proceeding apace recently, the schedule calls for the painting to be completed this weekend, the tile floors to be laid Monday and Tuesday and the cabinets to be installed by the end of next week!

The painters came for the first time yesterday to prime coat everything. I walked in after they had been there for only a couple of hours and I was instantly upset.

Any professional painter will preform certain very obvious tasks before he applies a drop of paint to any surface; He will inspect all of the surfaces to be sure they are ready to accept paint, he will mask off any windows to prevent getting paint on them and creating a terrible clean-up problem for himself later on, and he will remove all of the wall plates around all the light switches and electrical outlets. NONE of these things had taken place and these ladies were gleefully slopping paint everywhere in no particular order.

Three of my rather expensive dimmer switches had paint on them, many of the plates already had paint on them because of the technique these people were using to apply the paint to the wall which was to load their rollers very heavily and then to press hard on them as the rolled creating heavy lines and splattering paint everywhere, including on themselves. They had not even taken the time to cover my new lamp or my chair. I was on the phone at once.

I then proceeded to remove all of the plates from the wall myself while these three "professionals" looked on in surprise as if I was out of my mind. I managed to clean the dimmers of paint and they appear to still slide, but there is nothing connected to any of them so I was unable to check their function. We can only hope.

We have decided to apply the brakes to our schedule and slow down. More care is being applied to correcting the drywall issues and a new drywall crew will be coming out to correct the faults of the first. We have dismissed the painters and are again planning on painting ourselves, this will enable us to control what rooms and when get painted so that other portions of the job might continue if not exactly on schedule then at least with more alacrity than previously being applied.

We will be doing a detailed walk-through of the job later today to find every minor flaw that currently exists and to mark them so the crew can repair them before we begin painting again. This will also give us a bit extra time to await the arrival of our doors. (Lead time on doors is not to be believed!)

Every job of this type hits at least one snag and ours was going along far too smoothly so it was inevitable that we would come up against something somewhere. I'm glad we discovered some of these issues now instead of in a week, after they had spread all of our very expensive paint all over our walls only to have to do it again.

I will be paying much closer attention from now on I can tell you.