I know that for the rest of you out there, the words “contractor” and “hell” go hand in hand already. However, for me, the eternal optimist, the one who is always expecting to be pleasantly surprised by human nature, I refused to buy into this stereotype. Until now. Suddenly I have turned into a shrill housewifey wench, the image made complete by suburban address, dog, and child. Oh yeah, and the Volvo. But enough about me, or us. This is about the contractors.

Where to begin? Well, first, I can begin by saying that Mike’s mom’s diagnosis was confirmed and now the whole family can move forward, more knowledgeable about everything. It doesn’t make things peachy keen, but at least we all know what we are dealing with.

Lily - Day 5 of being sick with a “cold”. Why our pediatrician didn’t do a nasal swab for the flu on Monday, I do not know. Mike and I finally tired of being told we are paranoid first time parents, so we just called the doctor again and said that something was not right. Her fever was still high (Mike misheard me and told them she had a 107 degree fever - when he meant 101.7 - you can imagine the reaction the nurse had). He told us to take her to the ER at St. Mary’s. We had a great ER peds doc there and he quickly diagnosed the flu. Thankfully, no “pee-new-monia” as he said. I guess there is a major outbreak happening in Richmond right now - she was the 4th child this morning diagnosed with the flu. We took her home and tried to get her as much rest as possible with all the CONTRACTORS here. She was doing a little better tonight - she actually played and smiled a couple of times. Not seeing her smile since Saturday has been really hard, not to mention seeing her so listless and obviously feeling terribly . . .

However, this was her last Sunday on her birthday - so cute!

So back to the rest of the story. We’ve been having troubles, to put it mildly, with our home renovation project, which entails adding french doors to my office, ripping up and replacing all the carpet, and putting Pergo down in the kitchen and half bath. So we are smart and we hire “professionals”. First the french door dude (a subcontractor from Lowe’s) shows up and he sounds exactly like Roscoe Pecoe from Dukes of Hazzard. He looks exactly like Boss Hawg from same. He even showed up wearing camouflage suspenders and I saw plenty of crack while he was here, and I’m not talking about the drug. His “2 hour job” took 2.5 days. It’s still not right. In fact, as I sit here writing, I hear Mike on Eternal Lowes Hold for Amber, the door woman who took the order in the first place.

So the carpet comes in, and Mr. Carpet Dude (who, by the way, has the BIGGEST mullet I’ve ever seen) begins to lay the carpet on Monday. If you don’t know what a mullet is, you can check out here. 
Anyway, so he’s got a mullet, big deal. He can lay carpet, right? He shows up with his girlfriend, who is missing most of her teeth, and a 20 year old kid they refer to as “Q” (which always made me think of that weirdo on Star Trek, and the fact that I associate him with it proves I am a huge geek myself). Many problems begin, including, but not limited to:

- constant talking, even when I close my office doors. They continue to bust through them anyway
- critiquing the french door install, while Boss Hawg is still here doing it
- smoking insane amounts of cigarettes in my garage, to the point I’d swear they were doing it in the house, it smelled so bad
- toothless girlfriend picks up every knick knack I own and comments on it, including spraying my linen spray all over the hallway because she wants to see what it smells like
- mullet boy tells me every legal altercation he’s had in the past 5 years, including the fabulous information that he currently has no driver’s or business license

At this point, you might be wondering how I ended up with such professionals. I will tell you - the buying club we belong to recommended them, so I take no responsibility.

After being thoroughly annoyed by the mullet carpet crew, they tell me at the end of the day that I have defective carpet. Mullet Boy gets on the phone with the buying club and cusses out a girl who works there, who happens to be very nice. She hangs up on him. This means that my carpet can’t be finished and they leave with tack strips everywhere and our house torn apart. It wasn’t really their fault, but it was less than ideal.

Meanwhile, Pergo Man starts laying the floor. He and Mullet Boy had originally formed a partnership, but had since had a falling out, and currently hate each other. They begin to argue almost immediately. Mullet Boy wants to steal the quarter round part of the job from him - Pergo Man gets mad. I find out that I was shorted 84 feet (!!!!) of quarter round and start calling around again to find it. Then I find out two cartons of Pergo have been destroyed by some angry UPS driver. I call around again. Mullet Boy blows out our circuit breakers 6 different times by trying to run some huge buzzsaw thing in our garage. He blows out a lightbulb that we spent 3 months trying to replace (don’t even ask about that story). Pergo Man spends a lot of time talking and little time laying the floor. He also magically raises his rate per square foot, but I become the Shrill Suburban Beeeoootch and he reverts to Originally Quoted Price. Pergo Man, you guessed it, does not finish, and comes back today to finish the job.

Both Mullet Boy and Pergo Man were supposed to be here at 8 AM. We take Lily to the ER around 9. They are still not here. When we return at noon, exhausted and stressed out, we find our house much in the same condition as it was when we left. MB (Mullet Boy) and PM (Pergo Man) are barely civil to eachother. PM wants to use MB’s saw - MB refuses. PM has brought a friend along to help, who is coughing up a lung. Meanwhile, MB’s toothless girlfriend is wandering around our house. Actually, a better adjective would be “staggering”. She is moaning with each step “MMMM. OOOOOOOOH. AAAAAAAA.” I try asking her if she is okay, and she just smiles and continues to moan. I ask MB what’s up with his woman, and he tells me she’s just sick with the flu. She then nearly does a swan dive down our (uncarpeted) stairs. Mike loses it and tells everyone who is sick to get the hell out of our house. This was right after Toothless Girlfriend tries to touch Lily. Lung Hacker and Toothless Girlfriend are removed from the house - Mike tells Lung to go sit in the car for the rest of the day and he tells MB to take Toothless home where she belongs. As soon as they leave, I begin to freak out, because I have just about had it. It was apparent to all of us, including my father, who held the fort down while we were at the ER, that Toothless is on some major drugs. So I have a wacked out druggy wandering around the house while my daughter is sick with the flu and I start wondering how much jewelry has been taken while I was gone.

Turns out, as MB tells me later, Toothless took too much anti-anxiety meds (like 5 times her normal dosage) and was totally out of it. Gee, that makes it all better. PM runs out of Pergo and tells me that although I measured correctly, I should have known to add 10% overage to my order (duh, stupid me!). I then spend an hour faxing back and forth to a local company trying to get them to charge my credit card over the phone after jamming my scanner with it unsuccessfully trying to copy it. Then Q (the helper, not the Star Trek guy) has his unemployed 24 year old girlfriend call me to discuss home based internet businesses because somehow he got the idea that I had one, and that it was okay to give out my phone number. You can imagine the tone I had with her.

Closing time for MB - carpet is still not laid. There is a bare strip of wood in our bedroom and carpet fragments everywhere. It’s 4 PM - time for beer. So he splits, but not before asking me for over $1000, the total amount we owe him, right then. I tell him he’s not getting it before the job is finished, but that I’ll pay him a percentage. He then tells me he’s taking 20% of PM’s job cost because he “referred” PM to me. PM gets really angry and they get up in each other’s faces and start yelling at each other in my kitchen, while I’m feeding the baby, about who is right and who is wrong. I start dreaming that Mike is with me, or better yet, that I am in the Bahamas with no one I know. I finally snap back to reality and tell them to shut up, and give me an itemized list of who is getting what. I pay MB what I said I’d pay him and he leaves. PM gets upset because he wants to lay the quarter round and thresholds, and he’s mad at MB because he “stole” that part of his job from him. He wants me to call MB and tell him I want PM to lay it. WHATEVER. Then he gets into an intricate discussion with us (Mike is home by now) about what a “T connection” is and how it works. We really could not have cared less. They continue laying Pergo until 7.30, at which point Mike and I are almost passing out because we couldn’t cook dinner with them in there (oh yeah, Lung Hacker is back in the house).

SO. The end of the story: we are waiting on our carpet, the rest of the Pergo, and for Boss Hawg to come back out and clean up the mess he made of the french doors. Just put me in the nuthouse. We haven’t even started decorating for Christmas and right now I’d rather just crawl in a hole. I know this will be funny soon - in fact, it’s almost funny now - but I seriously lost it today a couple of times. When PM and MB came back to me for about the 7th time today to tell me “Girl, you’re going to seriously flip out NOW” (this time to tell me we ran out of Pergo), I just said “Quit explaining it to me and tell me what I have to do to fix it.” Quite rude.

Mike says we are never buying a house that requires this level of renovation again. I think I agree. Either that, or I’m going to hire a project manager to oversee renovations because I just can’t hack it with a 1 year old under my care, especially one with influenza.

I’d love to hear your contractor horror stories if you have any. You can e-mail them to me at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). In the meantime, I’ll be here - overseeing - until the day I am rich.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention two things.

1. PM prematurely removed the toilet, thinking he’d finish the half bath today. He ran out of Pergo, so now we have a pit in the middle of our bathroom. Anyone want to squat???

2. Lily got massive diarrhea from the antiobiotics today - prescribed erroneously by Peds Doc #1. She blew out her diaper and jetted out a stream of the stuff, then proceeded to roll around in it. She soaked her sheets and mattress pad. I ripped it off the bed and tried to throw it in the laundry, only to find that Mullet Boy had left the carpet uncut by the laundry room door and it was impossible to gain entrance to it. I had temper tantrum number 3 at that point, including cussing the laundry room door and Lily’s “ineffective” diaper.