No News is Good News?

Well... if you'd asked me this morning I would've said the fact that I've had little to no news to report about my house/The Hotbox, I would've said that was a bad thing.

I returned to the site the Tuesday after Memorial Day weekend to find very little accomplished and was pretty disappointed. I let the contractor know that I planned on moving my stuff into the back of the garage this weekend because I needed to move out of my room at my current place. When I explained that we still needed to put two coats of polyurethane on the floor before I moved things upstairs, he said there was only one day's worth of work left to do, so this should be fine.

After seeing the amount of work left to be done, I knew there was no way for this to be done in one day. I let the contractor know that there was much more than this to do and figured now that he was in the loop things would get rolling.

Wednesday night though, I still found nothing done.

Today (Thursday) I sent a reminder e-mail, along with a note about the bathroom countertop which is ready to be picked up.

At the end of the day a big rain storm was coming through.... my first thought was, "Hmm... I hope things are OK over at my house." Followed by, "Nah, I'm sure it's fine." After work I decided to go over to see the progress that surely had been made by now as well as ease my silly fears.....

...... to find the back door to the spiral stairs wide open and a huge puddle on the cork floor! And guess why the back door was open? Hmmm, could it be because one of the things still left to do that hasn't been gotten to is to put the back door knob and lock on?

I'd assume my sarcastic tone is making it obvious that I'm pretty pissed about this, but in case it wasn't clear: I am.

The transition between the two tiles directly in front of the door had taken water in, expanded, and swelled. Amazingly it only happened on this one seam, but because the water was coming in at the edge of the cork, water had seeped underneith the 5 tiles in the area around the door and the door casing also was wet. What will happen to these when they dry out, or over time, I really don't know. They might be fine, but I'm not sure. The two tiles with the swollen tongue and groove definitely need to be replaced though.

Because they're tongue and groove, removing just one or two tiles isn't possible (unless you cut off the tongue and groove, which is not "the right thing to do"). To do it right, the baseboards and door casing will have to be removed and a significant number of tiles will have to be removed and some of them will need to be replaced.

OK, that's all the bitching I have in me for now, but to wrap up: I plan on moving my stuff into the basement on Saturday and then as soon as the work upstairs is complete I need to polyurethane the floors and then move my stuff up.

Today wasn't a good day. (no comment on my use of AK's, please)