But wait, there's more!

Mr. Nola posting:
While the work at TOH was rocketing ahead, there was also a flurry of activity at Maison Derriere. A nasty flu conspired with my complete inability to estimate a realistic schedule, putting us several weeks behind on the painting. This was going to be a problem as soon as the cabinets were delivered because I had scheduled SurferDude's crew to receive and install them. So the weekend was spent in a marathon paint blitz in a house with no power nor water, taking occasional breaks to look next door and see the preparations underway to lift TOH.


Enough of the walls were painted that SD was able to install the cabinets, but there remains a lot of painting to finish. I need to accept the fact that I am not a fast painter. Unfortunately, I have fully embraced the fact that I'm too cheap to pay a professional to do the job, causing Nola no small amount of consternation.

I have mixed feelings about the previously mentioned "disappearing roofer." Whenever I have him on the phone he seems like a sincerely nice person. The problem is that his promises to finish the job, or even to call me if he can't make it, have gone unkept for too long. I had him on the phone again today and I heard the same line that I've heard every other day for the past month. If he shows up to finish the job, I might dignify him with a nom de blog; at the very least I shall stop complaining about him. But the smart money bets that he won't show up tomorrow. I will say this in his favor: at least he doesn't screen incoming calls. I have seen a dozen contractors who decided not to pick up the phone because a current or former client is calling-- I always worried that it would be my call that they ignore next time.

I met SD's plumber at Maison Derriere this afternoon and remain cautiously optimistic. The utility room floor plan has been reconfigured to something a little more workable. This new layout can be completely buggered with a poorly placed pipe, so the plumber has to think in three dimensions and use (gasp!) a certain amount of common sense when re-plumbing for the contents of this room, or the adjacent kitchen, or the two bathrooms that are directly overhead. Admittedly, this isn't the easiest problem that the noble trade of plumbing has ever seen. If it were easy, I would do it myself.*

* The agony you Jedi just felt was Nola, flinching at the idea of me taking on any more DIY projects as part of this undertaking.