An encounter with the Keystone Konstruction Kompany

This is my first encounter with construction, at least from a they're-building-this-around-me perspective....so if I'm snarking here about things that should really be expected, bear that in mind.

Over the last two and a half months, we've gone through one broken promise after another on when things would be done, what would be accomplished, had many unexpected and wholly unpleasant suprises along the way, and yet somehow, when the "Final Inspection and Finishing Touches" were supposed to have been done yesterday, according to the guy with the checkbook, who Red refers to as God (at least as far as our friends from the Keystone Konstruction Kompany are concerned, he is), I had high hopes that at long last we'd see the backside of plumbers, electricians, drywall hangers, carpet installation, inspectors, various catch-all-contractors, and other assorted people trapising though. Sadly, my hopes were dashed yet again.

Following Red's big showdown with the property manager last week, many things have been accomplished. We are, in fact, all back in our home and what we were told was the last of the construction stuff was finished today in the form of trim and trash cleanup. Mind you, more has been done in the last week than in the previous 72 days put together - there's a laundry list of it, but the short version is that everything has been done.

Or so we were told.

One would think that, since there's a definite order that things are done in in construction jobs, each individual item would be dealt with. For instance, providing lovely cabinets with flush doors would be followed immediately by putting handles on them. Insulation comes before drywall and paint, and so on. This is not the case with the KKK I've referenced, evidently. Over the last five days Red and I have been speculating a little on why the kitchen is so cold all the time. We found out today - there's NO GODDAMN INSULATION IN THE ATTIC SPACE.

How do you miss something like that? Seriously? We found out today, after the construction guys turned our heat back on a month ago, that half of the top floor of the house is totally without insulation between the actual kitchen and the attic space above it. 1/2" of drywall, some paint, and the plywood of the roof is the only thing keeping the heat inside my house. For obvious reasons we are NOT going to be paying the heating bill until this gets addressed, just as we took a $385 gas bill to the property managers last week (which, Red said, made the girl accepting it look like somebody had just booted her in the giblets).

Add to that the company that was coming in to do the cleaning. Now, the ladies that were here for four days did a bang-up job of cleaning the drywall mud off the floor that the drywall guys were too retarded to put a sheet down for, along with everything else. I talked to the cleaning company back in November when they were talking about doing the carpets here and said, "Well, if you guys are going to be here with the equipment anyway, let's take care of my furniture while you're at it." The guy from the cleaning company quoted me a price of $175 for doing deep cleaning of a reclining rocker, a full length 8' sofa, and two love seats. They charged my Visa for it shortly thereafter.

Nothing further was heard from them until last week, when they caught the aftershocks of Red's explosion via what I can only imagine was a frantic call from the property managers. They called us on Friday apologizing for not getting it done already, but correctly pointing out that cleaning it before now wouldn't really have helped since the construction guys can't evidently figure out how to clean up after themselves with both hands, a road map, and a flashlight. They scheduled it for this morning, when Red and the Little Pirate would be at home.

Unfortunately, nobody told the cleaning guy that he was supposed to come out. Red called them at about 1:00 this afternoon asking them when they were planning on coming, and their response was, "Uh....oops. Our bad, we didn't put you on the schedule," and sent a subcontractor. This was the point at which more fun ensued, when he got in, saw the furniture sitting there ready to be cleaned (where it's been for the last two and a half months, mind you), and asked which couch and which loveseat we wanted cleaned. Evidently, according to our records, that was all we'd been charged for.

I called the original cleaning company and asked them - I had made it very clear the first time around what I wanted done, the guy that had been at the house and seen the furniture already was the one that had given me the quote, and I'd paid for the service. As far as I'm concerned, that should be that - they should be providing the service I had bargained for, and if their records don't reflect that, tough shit. Oh, no, says the woman at the other end of the phone, we would never quote you a price that low, you must have misunderstood, and did you get this in writing? I hadn't, of course, which is an error I won't make again. Red, meanwhile, gave the guy that was actually here at the house a nice smile and asked him politely, and he ended up doing what we wanted anyway without charging us extra.

As I said, I think I'll let her deal with people from now on.

I blame President Obama. The fire happened November 4, and Election Day was November 6th. It can't be a coincidence.