i can do that for you, part 4

So what was the worst of our renovation saga? What made us go from patiently waiting out the I Can Do That For You delays and fibs?

Well, frankly, it was incompetence, dangerous incompetence. I mentioned the electrical errors in my previous installment, but there were structural errors as well.

When Diane's crew began to build large sections of walls, their incompetence became most apparent. The new walls were not at right angles; obviously crooked to the eye and confirmed with a level or straight edge. On a couple walkthroughs, even Fred (the big-deal contractor who had referred Diane to us) confirmed what we could easily see. Furthermore, within weeks of construction and plastering, the new wallboard began to bow so badly that this too was apparent to the eye--frighteningly apparent. If these were collapsing, what else would? What was going on inside the walls?

Diane and Mahesh had difficulties seeing the problem or, infuriatingly, blamed it on the original construction of the building. We actually were reduced to reminding them that these walls were new walls that they themselves had built where they had demolished old walls, closets and doorways. Instead of seriously considering our real concerns, about structural issues, for fuck sake, much less the service her men were providing, Diane made us feel that we were hurting their feelings by complaining, and then finally made excuses for their shoddy work by saying that this was an "economy job."

Despite continued attempts to have them correct these issues, several of the walls had to be repaired by subsequent workers, not only for the visual issues, but also for cracking plaster and deterioration that began to occur even before we moved in.

Time and again throughout the final months of construction, we requested that Diane and Fred provide us with better skilled workers, especially for the fine detailed work, and while Fred was willing to do so and on a few occasions provided better workers for discrete projects at additional costs to us, Diane resented the suggestion that her crew was not skilled enough to handle our project, and in several instances (e.g. plastering, skim coating and tiling in the kitchen) foiled our good efforts to get better craftsman from Fred's crew.

And the last straw?

First, she tried to get more money from us by fudging on an expense spread sheet, which we sent her back to the computer to correct three times before she realized she couldn't hoodwink us out of another penny.

Then at the end of August, our landlord in Brooklyn found new tenants for our Brooklyn apartment and requested that we vacate the apartment by September 12th. So we met with Diane on Sunday, August 21st to go over the final two weeks of work so that she and her crew could complete the unfinished work in time for painting all the rooms and finishing the floors before we moved in. We thought the meeting had been effective. We thought she got it.

But despite our efforts to impress upon her the tight schedule, despite her promise to be on top of the job, over the next two days she pulled all but one unsupervised secondary worker from our apartment to complete another job. On Monday a friend of ours stopped by and discovered this one worker there who confirmed that no one else was working with him that day.

On Tuesday morning, we met at the apartment with Diane and Mahesh (the fuckup upon whom she had relied as her "foreman"). During this meeting we were taken aback to discover that Mahesh was not at all aware of the issues or the urgent schedule that we had discussed with Diane two days earlier and we had to go back over all of these details with him. When we returned a few hours later, Diane and Mahesh were gone, again leaving only one unsupervised secondary worker for the rest of the day. When we called Diane, she could not promise that anyone else would return to the job that day, but kept insisting that the job would "get done."

But by the end of the week we were so far behind schedule that she admitted that we might not be able to keep to the schedule discussed at the beginning of the week. We blew up. We panicked and contacted Fred for assistance. Despite his best efforts to get Diane and her crew on track, several errors and omissions on Diane's part, including an unannounced seven-day vacation in the last week of our job, led to our final termination of her and her crew.

In the termination letter, we wondered why, on the many occasions that we had discussed our urgent deadline for completion of major work by September 8th, that she never once told us that she was anticipating being gone from September 1st to the 7th. We wondered why she waited until 5:25 p.m. on the 1st to send an email announcing that she was no longer available as of 5 p.m. And we were outraged to find that the person she was leaving in charge of all operations until her return was Mahesh, someone whom we had repeatedly and clearly said we did not trust to manage his own work, much less anyone else's.

Despite the presure we then were under to find new workers, as soon as we fired Diane and her crew, we were instantly relieved to have them out of our apartment and our lives. And, thankfully, the tenants who were to move into our Brooklyn apartment backed out and our landlord allowed us to stay indefinitely until repairs and construction could be completed.

Now Diane is suing us for the rest of the money she thinks we owe her, and has put a lien on our apartment and our co-op for the money. Never mind that, in order to complete and repair her mess, we ended up spending nearly three-times what she's demanding.

To the end, she is as unrealistic as she was throughout the job.

And already the lien has cost us time and money to get it bonded so that the co-op isn't held responsible. Even her lawyer is a real piece of work, i.e. when I spoken to him on the phone a couple times, I pictured a bulldog with a stinky cigar and a disheveled pin-striped suit, in a side garage office somewhere in Bayridge.

Our own lawyer keeps, inadvertently, referring to Diane's company as "I Can Do That TO You." We'll let you know how this turns out.