Home Improvement Gone Bad

The future bedrooms of Claire and Emma-just waiting so patiently for their drywall to be hung. 

While we are thrilled to be in a home that we want to settle down in, we are a bit overwhelmed by all the work that needs to be done. When we bought the house, we did so with the understanding that our contractor could finish the basement in 30 days. All the girls will have their own rooms down there and we thought it wouldn't be so bad to have all the girls in one room upstairs for a month or so while we finished it up. Well, three months into it they are still not finished. It's not a big surprise that you can't finish it in a month if you only work ONE day a week! Now that I got that off my chest, I'll admit they did pick up the speed after I emphasized how important it was that it be done by June 1st. We have company coming to visit and we really wanted to have enough room to host them. So one morning a few weeks back while the drywall was being delivered, a city official (I swear they're vultures) stopped by to check if we had a building permit. Although the builder had already paid for one, it had never been issued, so the city made us put construction on hold until it was. They were a couple weeks out on issuing them and we couldn't do anything until their inspector came over and gave us the go ahead. As you can imagine, I was FURIOUS! During and or around this time, Paul was at meetings in Boston and Toronto for over a week. While he was gone one night, I was drying some clothes and heard some pops that sounded like firecrackers. I went into the laundry room and  there were sparks shooting out from the back of the dryer. I quickly shut it off and pulled the clothes out. Good thing I was home or there might not be a house to finish a basement for. I called the Maytag people and they couldn't fit us in for a week, which was fine because I could dry my clothes at the laundromat or my mom's-another perk for living close to my parents. When the scheduled day of service came(a  whole Saturday wasted waiting) , the repairman never did. When I called to complain, they said they could reschedule for the next week. I politely refused and said I would call someone else. Then they called me back on a Sunday morning to again ask if I wanted to reschedule. I wasn't quite as polite this time. Anyway, Monday we called Sterling of Sterling Appliance and he had our dryer up and running that same day for 79 bucks. Talk about service! While Sterling was fixing our dryer, Jones Paint and Glass was attempting to replace the five windows that were broken when we moved in. In their attempt, they got one window in, broke another while trying to put it in and had three others that didn't fit, because they measured wrong.  Today, they finally completed the job and I'm so excited to have all the windows fixed, well, except for the one in the basement that the dry wallers broke when they were bringing in the drywall during the incident that started this post. All but that one, which I was told would be replaced by the end of that very same day. That was three weeks ago. Still broken. Oh, and did I mention that on one of the very few days this year that it has been warm enough to turn on the air conditioning, it didn't work. We had to call Kelly of Kelly's Heating and Air to come and fix that bad boy. It's been one of those months, there's really nothing more I can say. Except that we do now have our permit, the drywall is hung and now the tedious jobs of mudding, taping and painting will occupy the next couple of weeks. Good thing Paul ponied up and hired out for these jobs. We could have been living in limbo for a very long time. More pictures to come....