Just a quick note to say the move went… poorly.

We made a somewhat last-minute decision to have the painters who completed the priming of the house and painting of the ceiling, actually complete the painting of the entire house instead of tackling that ourselves.

The head painter said he’d have 5 people on site on Wednesday and complete everything in 1 day. There was 1 guy.

The next day the same guy showed up. Calls to the head painter were met with repeated claims of “I’m on my way” for several hours. By about 1:00pm the 1 painter just left leaving his tray and cans open (probably thinking everyone else would be showing up soon). They finally showed up at 3:30pm and did work quite late, but they weren’t done.

“No problem.” They were going to show up early the next morning and finish everything in 1-2 hours. Since we wouldn’t arrive with our movers until 11, that was no problem.

The movers arrived to wet walls and work in progress everywhere. No rooms were complete but rather at some stage of completion. Therefore NOTHING could be moved against any wall, everything would have to be piled into the centers of every room. Chaos.

Try to have a 1.5 year old running around a house where everything is teetering. We couldn’t be more than a foot away from him unless he was in the master bedroom (our one ‘safe’ zone).

It took the movers at least an extra hour to complete the move as a result and we’ll now have to spend the next week moving everything into position. :-\

Shortly after settling down after the move we started to look around and realized the paint job was awful. Just really really bad. (Our costly Yolo Zero-VOC paint smeared across the walls instead of rolled; bad cutting; bad seams around the windows; drips on the walls; drips/spray on the floors, unfinished wood trim, door handles, etc.)

There was a somewhat heated exchange with the painter on Saturday and we plan on picking up the discussion about how (and who?) is to be compensated on Monday. He had said he would bring a rep from the painting union and we wanted to discuss the issues with our builder.

He insists he can fix all these problems but we can’t possibly allow him to burn up another 10 (or so) gallons of paint trying to make a sloppy, clumpy wall look smooth.

We’ve spent the last two days with one of us taking care of the our young fellow while the other tried to clean & organize but it’s going to be a long process, it seems. This is really not what we needed now.

And another horror story starts for the blog. Unbelievably exhausted right now. It may be a few weeks before I get another post up here, while we focus on getting things settled.

(I should add: the house is frickin’ awesome otherwise. Just about everything else came together much better than we had hoped!)

With one day to spare the power is finally on at that house. The gas is ready to be turned on and Enbridge is scheduled to turn it on today!

The house is still being painted, the front porch still being completed, and there are a few critical taps that need to be installed but it all appears to be unfolding well at the end!