Doors and Holes

Mr Tabubil is feeling peevish. That 8.3 earthquake last September knocked our front door out of skew. and we now have a one centimeter gap between the bottom of the door and the floor.  It's not much gap, but in cold weather it leaks heat like a broken sieve, and whenever there's a wind, the draft hits the far side of the apartment with a speed that makes one ponder more exotic aspects of physics and meteorology.  It's probably something quantum.*
            Mr Tabubil has bought a rubber weather strip to cover the gap. 
We didn't get one last winter, because most of the city was in our position, and there was a run on the hardware stores and by the time everything was back in stock, the weather was warm.
            This evening he took the door off its hinges, screwed on the brass plate of the weather strip, and spent three quarters of an hour fussing and straining and worrying and fiddling and putting a hold in his hand and hammering and crimping and bashing and pulling to get the un-skewed door back on its hinges.  Turns out a lot of things were out of skew.
            And then he closed the door - and the rubber bit of the weather strip, quite unceremoniously, peeled off.

Ow.

Right now he is browsing the websites of the major hardware chains with the request to be left alone please, and, at intervals, huffing hugely.

*(Sir Pterry - respect.)

Curtains, Part Three

In which we meet the maestros. 

In which the maestros attempt to give us what we, in fact, didn't want and didn't intend to take.   

Someone at the curtain store must have talked to someone, because twenty-four hours after the maestro (workman) and his cut-price curtain rails had jingled their way out of my apartment, the curtain store went into full damage-control mode. They were terribly sweet. The bodega (warehouse) sent regular daily updates on the progress of my new curtain rails, and when, six days later, they called me to tell me that all was ready for a proper installation, they turned themselves into pretzel knots making it clear that they were completely and entirely at my disposal. Any time I liked.

            "Monday, for instance." They said. "Would Monday work for you?"
            "Lovely." I said.
            "Between ten-thirty and eleven in the morning?"
            "Perfect."

            "You will be home, won't you?" They said anxiously. "We're not putting you out?"
            "I'll be there," I said. "Between ten-thirty and eleven."
            "Wonderful." They said. They bowed themselves off the phone and I looked forward to a nice job very well done.
            Accordingly, when the clock ticked round to twelve-thirty on Monday morning with no sign of the curtain people, I found myself feeling moderately miffed, and I called the shop.
            "Yes." The man on the phone said. "We thought we'd drop by around three.  Four at the latest.  Sound good?"
            "You said ten-thirty to eleven!"
            "Well we did say that." He said, as if it were all perfectly reasonable and obvious. "Yes, we did.  Is three o'clock okay, then?"
            "You've got to  give me a heads-up on this sort of thing " I said. "I can't be at home this afternoon.  I've got a dental appointment at three o'clock!"
            "You do?" He cried. "But we have a delivery!"
            "For ten-thirty this morning!"
            The voice on the phone sobered abruptly. "I'm going to have to talk to my manager about this." He said. And he hung up.

"I understand." His boss said portentously, "that there is an issue of a medical appointment."

            "No." I said. "The issue is that you were supposed to deliver my curtain rails this morning. And you didn't."
            "That isn't the issue." He said. "The issue is that we have a delivery to make and you have declined to be home at the hour set."
            "Three and a half hours after you were supposed to be here? I'm happy to be home for you, but you've got to let me know in advance. You told me you were coming this morning, so I made a dental appointment for this afternoon-"
            "Which is when we're delivering-"
            "Which is not what we discussed-"
            "And if you're not there, we can't deliver."
            "Right!" I cried. "Right! Exactly!"
            "Oh." There was a long, thoughtful pause. "In that case, we'd better reschedule for tomorrow."
            "Yes." I said.
            "Tomorrow." He said. "Will you be home tomorrow between ten-thirty and eleven?"

Curtains, Part Two

When I ordered curtains for our brand new renovated apartment, I ordered nice curtain rails to go with them. I wanted the sort of rail that has sliders and cords to winch the curtains in and out, not just a rod to hang rings on, with a wooden stick at the leading edge to pull the curtain across the window. I don't like that sort.
            When the maestro (workman) arrived to install the curtains, he knocked on the door and I saw him through the peephole with his arms full of lovely-looking rails. But as meter after meter of shining aluminium slid through the door behind him, it became clear that these rails were the cheap, jingly sort with noisy rattling hooks and a rod to drag the curtain along behind- the very sort curtain rail I had paid a premium not to have in my shiny new flat.
            "Are these our rails?"
            "Yep." The maestro smiled at me sunnily and dropped the lot of them in a rattling, clattering, jangling heap on my feet.
            "We ordered the other sort."
            "You did," he said, "yes, you did, but we're giving you a special deal. For exactly the same price we're giving you a much better sort of rail."
            I looked at him and he looked back. I cracked first. "Would you," I said "please explain to me why these other rails are much better than the ones we paid for?"
            He looked at his boots, and sighed, and then he looked at me, compassion writ large all over his face.
            "The fact is, you didn't pay for the other sort. I didn't want to have to say it, but this was all you paid for."
            "Would you mind waiting one minute while I go and get the paperwork?" I walked across the dining room to the table and picked up the invoice. I pointed to the relevant line.  "It says here-"
            He interrupted me. "No. This is what you paid for and this is what you've got! People are always trying to get something for nothing. Don't think you're going to get anything out of us!"
            He picked up a the end of a rail and dragged it toward the dining room window, electric drill in his other hand.
            "I'm going to call the store now." I said.
            "You do that." He said, and he whirred the drill once or twice, meaningfully.
            The nice folks over at the shop had  a copy of my invoice in their records and after we read it together, line by line, twice, they were reluctantly compelled to admit that what I'd paid for wasn't in fact, what I was having installed in my new flat. Even more reluctantly, they agreed to get the dear maestro and his shoddy rails out.
            "So I'm supposed to take all this away with me?"
            "Yep."
            "But I brought it here."
            I was getting cross. "That," I said, "is not my problem."
            "Fine." He slammed an armful of rails into a noisy pile on the floor. "Fine. I don't have any of the other sort in the bodega (warehouse) right now. You wanted curtain rails- I gave you curtain rails! Now I'm going to have to go and find some of the other sort!"
            "You do that."
            He looked at me balefully.  "It's going to take time."
            "Excellent."
            "You won't have your curtains up till next week."
            "All right."
            "I can't believe I came all this way!"
            With his arms full of jingling rails, he stamped furiously out the door. He'd have slammed it behind him too, but by the time the tail end of the very last four meter length of rail has slithered out behind him, the momentum was lost.

Curtains, Part One

On Thursday last week, the curtain company that had done the curtains in our old flat sent a maestro (workman) to visit to our new flat. As per previous discussions with the company, he was there to measure our new windows, and to look at the measurements of our old curtains and decide the best way of using the old curtains and how much new material we'd need to buy.
            He was a lovely fellow - very professional, very understanding, and we had a nice long talk, the upshot of which was that he wanted to take both the old and the new measurements back to the shop with him so that his fellow curtain-people could help him how best to maximize the material that I had.
            He'd call me Friday - or Monday at the latest, because the best option might take a little thought. I heard nothing, so today I called the curtain company. And this is what the manager said:
            "What on earth are you talking about? The maestro came back and said you wanted all new curtains and that you were coming out to the shop to choose materials. We've been waiting for you."

Final Contractor Visit

Our team of illustrious construction maestros is  back in the apartment for Last Fixings and Sweeping Up - a door that won't close, an electrical socket that isn't live, a closet that needs painting, a wall whose paint is bubbling suspiciously - all that sort of thing.
 
And the following advisory is now in effect:
The next young man who attempts to use a clean ironed pillowcase as a drop-cloth for plastering is in immediate and specific danger of a thick ear.

Just saying.

It Takes a Village to Move to a New Apartment

/ˈdʒɛnt(ə)lmən/
noun

A person of superior conduct who, through the whole detail of his manners and deportment, and with the ease of a habit, a person shows respect to others in such a way as at the same time implies, in his own feelings, and habitually, an assured anticipation of reciprocal respect from them to himself.
                                             -(principally Coleridge)

When I moved us from our old apartment to our new apartment - it was me who spent weeks on the phone and the email sorting out fees and inventories with the moving company. When a manager came to do a walk-through, it was me who was home to meet him and walk him through the apartment, valued inventories and massing lists in hand. 
           My husband happened to be home as well that day.  He was curled up miserably on the sofa with the flu - and when I'd shown the moving supervisor everything there was to show, he turned and away from me, walked into to the living room, sat down next to my husband and said "So. What are your questions?"
           My husband looked at him blankly. He pointed at me and said "Ask her. She's running this move."           
 The man looked at him, then looked at me and said "Who?" His face was genuinely confused.            
            While my husband goggled, the man nestled in close on the sofa and said "Right. Now let's look at the lists. Are you happy with the prices? Are you happy with the valuations? What else do you want to know?"            
            I walked out of the room and left them to it.

The men who actually packed us and moved us were an entirely different set of souls: kind,competent, splendid at what they did, and swift - rooms rolled away beneath their clever, competent fingers, vanishing into paper and bubbles and large cardboard boxes. It seemed almost cruel  to do what I needed to do to refined professional men like these.          
            "Um," I was obliged to say. "We've also got stuff in the bodega (storeroom) downstairs in the basement. There's boxes of books, bicycles, our christmas tree, and, er, um.  Very much Um."
The jefe (supervisor) of the moving looked at me with a raised eyebrow.           
            "There's this smell-" I hurried on before my nerve broke. "Last week a pipe broke in the building basement. The landlord won't do anything about it - we can't even reach our landlord. He stopped answering his phone sometime after the third call.  The water doesn't seem to have actually touched any of our things, and since we're moving today-
            We came down last night and looked through all our stuff, and it seems all right,  but there IS that, er, that smell.  I'm just telling you so you know."
           Down in the warren of bodegas in the building basement, it was cold and it was damp and it was was very dark. The sort of dark where you could imagine things moving  in the corners on tentacles, or many sets of skittering, articulated legs.            
             "Sorry about that," I said apologetically. "The light's broken as well. It's on a timer, but the timer snapped, and the building management hasn’t gotten around to repairing it yet."
            Outside the door to our own bodega, water dripped from a broken pipe overhead into a bucket at our feet. 
            Plunk. 
            It echoed. 
            Plink.
            The jefe wrinkled his nose.           
            "The building management won't touch it," I said. "They say it's up to the landlord, because it's outside his bodega, even if it is technically in the hallway, which is technically a common space. We came down last night and put a bandaid on it, but it seems to have started leaking through.  At least the super seems to have put down a bucket -"
            The jefe turned the handle of the door to our bodega and pushed.           
            "The door sticks," I said apologetically. "It's because of the damp, and I'm sorry about that - "
            The jefe leaned into the door and shoved. It gave way and he fell into the narrow slice of basement that was our bodega, and the smell hit us like a wall.            
            "That," I choked, "is much bigger than it was yesterday."
            Hand clamped over his nose, the jefe looked up and down the little room. A ripple of water ran down the wall from the ceiling and vanished behind a row of cardboard box on a high shelf.           
            "Lets have a look."  A voice said.  A crowd of curious moving men had gathered behind us in the dark hallway.  Breathing carefully through his mouth, a burly man squeezed past us, and wedging himself between  a bicycle and a pair of collapsible camp chairs, he chinned himself up onto the shelf and - 
            "Yeeeeuuuuugggghhh!"
            He came down hard.  Right onto the narrow steel stem of the bicycle, which  twisted wildly and dropped him onto us. He scarcely noticed. Shudders were passing through his body like waves - 
            I chinned myself up to look.The water ran only slowly down the wall, but in the cool underground the wall had burst out exuberantly in black and orange mould - fanning out like flowers the size of my open hand.  It was entirely revolting.
            "It's only running down the wall," I said weakly. "The boxes should be fine."
            The jefe, who had not seen the mess, nodded and reached for one. It wouldn't come. He tugged. The box wouldn't give. The jefe adjusted his hernia belt and gave one more pull-           
            And the box came away from the shelf with a terrible sucking sound -  
            The cardboard box had liquefied. There's no other word for it. The bottom half of the box had become a spongy mess of rotten wood pulp and blooming black subterranean flowers. It was the most organically repulsive thing I have seen in my entire life - and that life includes almost twenty years living in humid, sticky, perpetually decomposing tropical jungle. It was purely, exquisitely, comprehensively, horrible.             

We slurped the sodden box out of the bodega and released it to ooze onto the floor of the corridor.  There, in that manky darkness, I sat and sorted through the muck, seeing what might be salvaged.  
            Plink. All through that cool creeping underground, the sound of dripping water ran. 
            Plink. Plink. 
            Plunk. 
            A moving man had gathered up the mass of seeping, dribbling, cardboard and was carrying them away to the trash. He had, I noted, gone back up to the apartment and broken into a packed box of kitchen stuff to find a pair of rubber gloves.  
            Another man - the man who had seen the flowers blooming on the wall - stood behind me and watched.  His breath was light and thready and his hands worked spasmodically, clenching, unclenching, clenching - and he was in my light. Gooseflesh down to my bones, I looked up to tell him to go away, that we didn't need two people knee deep in this slime - and I saw him, standing by my shoulder with the look of a man braced to stay whatever the cost - he had seen something he could not unsee, and he would not leave me alone with that horror. He had made up his mind to stay. It was the noblest thing I have ever seen.             
            His rubber-gloved mate trotted back from the trash, and with a shame-faced look at him, my friend knelt down beside me, scooping up armfuls of the mouldering slush too far gone to salvage. The wet weight of it was too much for him and he lurched forward - too far.  He lurched across the bucket and lurching, caught a single drop of water square on the base of his neck.            
            He screamed - a high, thin scream, and jumped, clawing at his back as he straightened,  and scattering slime from end to end of the corridor.            
            And no-one, not one single one of his workmates, not then, not later - not one of them laughed.

In fairness to the manager at the beginning of this piece - there are apparently other standards of behavior a man can play with.           
            During our renovation, I had sub-contractors who folded their arms and stared at the ceiling and hummed when I spoke to them- men whose eloquence miraculously returned the moment they were in the presence of another man, after I had gone and hauled some some other man away from his work to do my talking for me- men whose sudden return to eloquence consisted principally of how "I have been trying to explain to this woman how she just doesn't get whateveranythingatallthatshemighthavewanteddone. She just won't listen."    
            The reason I was crying in the hallway of my new apartment while a pack of divinely-inspired kitchen apprentices refused to leave when I told them to? They were waiting for my husband to tell them to go.           
             Last week I had to go see an insurance agent about a policy on the our place. I caught myself putting on a fresh shirt that exposed just a little more than usual of my rather meager assets, and brushing on an extra layer of mascara, and practicing a hair flip and a giggle. And I realized that I was doing this because in actual fact, if I act a little helpless and girly, our agent beams paternally and gives me slightly better deals.            
            I thought about it, and i thought about it, and I shrugged, and put on a second coat of lipstick. If you can't beat 'em, at least get 'em to give you a discount.

Post- Script.

Mr Tabubil's mother is wonderful.  When our lease on our rental apartment ran out with our new apartment still a gutted shell, she smiled as we took over her apartment with our boxes and bags, and she fired up the BBQ and baked apple pies to keep us both in fighting trim. She came apartment hunting, she came tile shopping, paint shopping, appliance shopping - willing to drop everything and anything to lend me her opinion or a firm supportive arm. She stood behind me when I needed moral support, quietly acting as my second guess and sanity check. Was I legitimately upset?  Was this really happening?  Should I be mad or had I lost all perspective - and possibly my mind?
            Always she was there there, with a firm nod of "Yes. Stand your ground. Kitchen plumbing is not optional - nor are front doors - and walls are meant to stand up straight.  I promise you they are."

About a week after the new flooring was installed, there was a day where I couldn’t be on site.  Mr Tabubil took over my agenda - he had a couple of sub-contractors to pay, and a delivery time to nail down with the people who’d sold us our stove. Easy as pie.
            That evening I was in the kitchen making sandwiches with my mother-in-law.  The front door slammed and Mr Tabubil came crashing in –  banging doors and thumping his feet and generally throwing an absolute tantrum.
            The stove people had been intolerable, he shouted.  He waved his hands a lot and stamped his feet -
            Firstly, they'd told him that  the store manager had cancelled the delivery because we hadn't paid on time.
            "What delivery?!” He’d said.  “And what do you mean we haven't paid on time?  There was no time! I'm here to schedule a delivery.  I’ve got the receipt for payment right here -  I’m here to make a time!”
            At that, apparently, the stove people had gotten personal. Rather in the same vein as the man from the flooring company. And Mr Tabubil was infuriated. Because this was ridiculous!  Who behaves like that?!  All he’d wanted to do was schedule a damned delivery!
            It was the funniest thing I'd ever seen.  The poor man was stamping up and down the kitchen, waving his arms at the light fixtures and literally vibrating with rage, and instead of sympathizing, I found myself shaking with laughter.  I looked over at my mother-in-law.  Her eyes were bright and she was making little fizzing noises - and squeaking through her nose, whenever he turned his back.
            Mr Tabubil roared and stamped away into the living room.  My mother-in-law and I grabbed each other by the shoulders and we rocked back and forth, crying with laughter. It was tremendous.
            Mr Tabubil thumped his way back into the kitchen, looked at us in disbelief and opened his mouth- and my mother-in-law shouted "Yes! That's right! One more, Mr Tabubil! A big one! All together now- AGGRRRRGGGGHHHHH!"
            And Mr Tabubil gaped at her and said "This is serious!"
            "Yes!" She cried.  "I know! I've been there when it's all happening!  I've seen Tabubilgirl come home every day! This is exactly what it's like!"
            She and I looked at each other and we were off again, laughing like loons.  It was massively liberating, seeing things from the other side of the mirror.. But mostly I just laughed and laughed.  It was too terribly funny.
            And then I made the poor man a sandwich.  His blood sugar was low.

Seriously last post about the renovation. Honestly.

You can blame the cats. We hadn't planned to replace the floors in the bedrooms when we renovated the place. Yes, the carpets were a little manky-looking, but manky-looking is okay, isn't it? We'd give them a good shampoo and replace them with wooden floors a year or so down the line. The budget wasn't infinite, y'know?
            Our contractor Rodrigo pressed his lips together and said absolutely nothing.

It was when the rest of the apartment had been gutted and its floors and walls and furnishings hauled out to the skip,  that we began to smell the Smell.  It was a deep, rich, feline stench that seemed to spread and to strengthen hourly. In the bedrooms the stains in the corners of the carpet blurred and twisted in our tearing vision, stretching out long wavering arms of Smell and reaching up to grab us by the throat. 
            It was cats. Twenty years of cats, to be precise. Twenty years of incontinent cats on a carpet that had never been once washed or wiped, or toweled dry - twenty years of incontinent cats who'd made themselves favorite places in the corners of carpets, and the lower reaches of what had once been drywall  -  and  was now a crumbling font of rich ammonical reek -
Our contractor moved in with crowbars, and I went out and bought floors. 
            I found good floors.  Sturdy and solid and shining, from a firm that positively wallowed in positive affirmations, and which offered me a complete installation for a very good price.
           Everything was sunshine and roses right up to the day of installation - when it turned out that things had gone ever so slightly wrong. 
            The floors had been delivered, all right, but not to us. After the initial irate telephone call of "What the heck did you do with the wood we delivered yesterday? The installation boys are here and say you're hiding it on us!" the company became very cagey on the subject. Persistent questioning disclosed that  the delivery crew had  knocked on the door of an entirely different apartment in an entirely different building at the entirely opposite end of Santiago, and an enterprising somebody had said "why yes, I am Tabubilgirl" and signed for it on the spot.
            I don't know whether she ended up keeping it, but an entirely brand new load of flooring arrived at our address the two days later, and we never ever mentioned it again.

I was gifted with two strong young men to do the installation.  They were apprentices and it was apparently their first week on the job, but they swore that the supervisor's arrival was imminent. Really. Double-swear, and they wouldn't touch so much as a hammer until he came to show them what to do. Double-triple-pinkie-swear, really. 
            They had sincerity in their eyes, and I had invoices for laundry sinks and hot water heaters to pay, so just imagine my surprise when I came back two and a half hours later and found the job almost complete, with no supervisor in sight.
            The installation had gone iffily. The two young men had a decent grasp of right angles and appeared to know how to use a saw, but their technical knowledge had clearly been exhausted before they got to the complexities of the hammer. I'm not claiming any superiority of technique, but when I hold a hammer, instead of dialing in the location of the blow by approximates and test swings, generally I aim for the nail. 
            Our brand new rooms looked like they'd been ground zero for a convention of clog-dancers rehearsing for the annual stub-toe all-comers.
            "Are you going to replace the floor?"
            "No."
            "Can you give me a reason why not?"
            "Because we won't."
            And that, apparently, was that. After a conversation that was extremely unsatisfactory on all sides, phone calls happened, and I got the opportunity to deliver lines like:
            "I would like to have a reasonable discussion on the subject, one that consists of more than "I can't', 'its not possible', and 'Its not my fault'. At present we are not having that conversation."
            My delivery was splendid - strong and outraged, with hint of fragile wobble and tears. And it only took the company three weeks to get back to me.
  
Pro tempore, we were building bedroom closets. The basic infrastructure had gone up before the new floors went in, but the shelves and the drawers needed building, and our cabinet maker swore black blue and sideways that the only possible place in which to build them was right next to the closets themselves, ("as close as possible for measuring purposes," he said) right in the middle of the brand new master-bedroom floor.
            I offered him the living room. He looked at me scathingly and whistled between his teeth. I insisted on the living room, and helped him out by picking a load of saw-edged fiberboard and carrying it out of the bedroom. He went home early in a fit of pique and when I got to the apartment the next morning, I found he'd beat me by half an hour. He was back in the bedroom, sawing merrily away - bits of fiberboard clattering off of the end of the sawhorse and bouncing off the (formerly) varnished floor.
            While I waited for Rodrigo to arrive, we compromised on a layer of cardboard to cover the floorboards and a dropcloth on top of that, but when I came back from inspecting the installation of countertops in what might someday be the kitchen, the dropcloth had been rudely pushed to the side of the room and the cardboard wasn't anywhere. The carpenter was hammering now, the spent nails pinging gaily off the floorboards, where occasionally, they stuck.
            Words were had.
            "Don't worry about it."  Rodrigo said when he arrived. "I'll talk to him. He'll keep the dropcloth. But don't worry so much - he doesn't want to hurt anything. He's a careful worker. How much damage could there be?"
            Every morning I put that dropcloth down, and every morning it went away - pushed away, scuffed away, dragged away - tools were lost under it, nails were kicked under it, claw-hammers were dropped on it, the claw-points facing down-
            Rodrigo, staring glumly at the mess, said that he'd be happy to go fifty-fifty for a new floor if the flooring company ever called back. And I  began cataloging  scratches with post-it stickers. I was keeping score.

While writing this piece, at this point I stepped away from the computer and went to find Mr Tabubil.
            "I'm writing about the floor." I said. "And I don't know if I should be writing about it. Who's going to believe me? After everything else I've written about this renovation, I feel I'm at a point where the only sensible reaction a reader can have is to say I'm making it all up."
            Mr Tabubil giggled. "You do have to admit-"
            "I know." I said. "It's ridiculous. I've been going through my email and phone records - even I hadn't remembered how ridiculous the whole thing was. Do you remember how when I finally did get through to the flooring company, and they told me that it the situation was entirely my fault?  I hadn't said what sort of installation I wanted. I hadn't said I wanted nice."
            Mr Tabubil burst out laughing.
            "Seriously! I got angry, and eventually they agreed to send a man to look at the floors - and when he did, he arrived two hours before schedule and called me on the telephone, screaming and shouting and calling me the most vile names- and when my voice began to shake, he stopped yelling and very calmly told me that since I had failed to show up for our meeting, any possible consideration of any hypothetical damage was off.
            And when Rodrigo found me, holding the telephone and looking for someone to disembowel, he told me not to take it personally because it was only a regular business tactic."
            "I remember that!"  Mr Tabubil said.
            "He's trying to intimidate you." Rodrigo told me. "Particularly because you're a woman - he knows he did a bad job, and he thinks if he can scare you enough, you'll go away." And I looked at him and lifted my hands and said "But Rodrigo, I will go away. I'm new in town. I'm just a gringo. I've got no contacts - I've got no networks - I've got no leverage - I've got no way to make them fix it."
            And Rodrigo looked at me grimly and said "I might." and went away to make some phone calls and three days later it turns out that suddenly the company was going fifty-fifty with him on replacement floors, no argument, just like he wanted, and he wouldn't say a single word about it. Only I went and did some investigating myself, and it turns out he just might have threatened the company with a city-wide boycott - a whole city full of contractors refusing to let any of their clients use that company for their flooring. All for three new bedroom floors in a little apartment in Providencia. Nobody is going to believe a word of it!"
            Mr Tabubil whooped. "Nobody in North America is going to believe a word of it! But write it anyway. Everyone in Chile will know exactly what you're talking about."

So here's how it went:
On the day of the new installation, I was out shopping in the city. I didn't want to know, and I didn't want to care. Mr Tabubil decided that someone ought to. He told his boss he was working from home that day and took his laptop over to the new flat to watch the show -
Around about 11, my cell phone rang.
            "I don't want to hear it." I said.
            "You do," he said earnestly, "you really do. Guess who the flooring company sent over to install the new floors?" And he giggled. 
            "You're not serious."
            "Yup." He said, and giggled again. "They sent the same two idiots who laid it the first time. Rodrigo is… sort of upset. Listen -" he stopped talking, and in the background of the call I could hear roaring.
            "I" I said, "Am going to go eat ice-cream. And maybe watch a movie."  
            And I hung up. 

Almost the last renovation post. Honestly.

A few night ago, Mr Tabubil had a skype call with his sister. I heard her asking “how Tabubilgirl was doing? How’s the blog? I haven’t heard much from her for the last few months-”
            And poor Mr Tabubil got an earful from my direction while he winced and said very carefully into the microphone that "No-o, Tabubilgirl has had to put her life rather on hold for the last six months or so. She's acting pretty cabin-feverish, these days, as well-"
            And then he had to dodge a pillow that had been mysteriously flung out of nowhere right at his head. And another one that was mysteriously aimed right at his computer.
            "You can't hit her." He yelped, his arms wrapped around the monitor. "She's in Washington. How cabin-feverish are you? We’ve reached some sort of delirium state now?"

Hello. I’m back. It’s been a while. I descended into the dark underbelly of the kitchen design industry, and then I clawed my way up and out of the other side, and I no longer come home at night to howl and shred pillows in the privacy of my room.
            Bawling after the fact, in privacy, being less legally compromising than threatening kitchen designers with defenestration as a motivational technique.

The last time I talked about the renovations, we were having an extremely dynamic day.  Among other interesting events, I was on the phone with the head office of a kitchen design company, trying to find out why a delivery of kitchen cabinets wasn’t happening. The call wasn’t going very well.

When the cabinets did finally arrive at the flat – only three weeks after they were completed in the factory, they didn’t actually fit. 
            The dimensions of the cabinets didn’t match the dimensions of the kitchen or the dimensions on the architect’s plans, neither of which corresponded with each other in some rather significant respects. 
            I called the head office to complain, and got a martyred sigh in reply. They’d worked so hard, the Architect said, on those cabinets. They really had. Cutting, gluing, screwing, sanding – her voice got a whole lot crisper and a whole lot harder. Whether or not they actually fitted was now immaterial. They were there. If we wanted new ones we’d have to pay up front for a whole new kitchen. And if we had a problem with that, we could smoke it.
            Eighty decibels of heated opinion later, I had a new set of cabinets on order, with no idea that this was going to be the high water mark of our relationship. In retrospect, I should have dropped the issue and found a new kitchen to go with the cabinets instead.
            Along the way to our finished kitchen, we learned all sorts of things - for example, right about the moment when our building’s residents at the point of defenestrating us, we discovered that our kitchen designers had a whole department of painters and plasterers and general odd-job cleaners and construction specialists on standby – devoted exclusively to the repair of apartments that didn’t actually belong to their clients. In all fairness, they did get the all the apartments on floors two through four of our building completely cleaned up on only two hours notice, but it gave us some serious pause for thought.

Meanwhile, Rodrigo,  our general contractor, was getting curious. And the kitchen countertops had arrived. They were the wrong size, the wrong shape, the wrong material and only five weeks late, but at this point, that was about par for the course.

“I’ve got a friend who does kitchens.” Rodrigo said one afternoon. I was sitting in the half-painted hallway outside the kitchen with my head in my hands. Inside the kitchen, a pair of young apprentices- their very first week on the job-  were sealing the joins in the stone countertops with a silicone almost exactly opposite on the color wheel, and refusing to call a  supervisor on the basis that any discrepancy in color was due to vision problems. Mine.
            But I was fighting back.  By this point in the game, I had the Head Executive of the kitchen company on speed-dial. 
            “He’s an independent contractor, this friend of mine,” Rodrigo said. “He’s pretty busy at the moment. Has all the work he can handle – and more.” 
He waited politely while I dialed the CEO’s number and yelled at an answering machine for a while.
            “They’re not picking up?” He said.
            “That’s the fifth time I’ve called. I think they’re screening my number. Can I borrow your phone?”
             He handed me his cell phone. I dialed and got the answering machine again, so I yelled at it from his phone for a while. 
             Rodrigo scratched the back of his head reflectively.  “I’ve been asking around,” he said. “Everyone in Santiago who does kitchens is pretty busy right now.  Turns out your kitchen company has been kicked off of half their projects in the last six months. You said you got the recommendation from a friend?”
            “Two friends.” I sighed. “Their kitchens were amazing. They couldn’t say enough about these guys. They were swift, professional, timely, good at what they did -”
            From the kitchen came the sound of stone grinding on stone. We both grimaced.
            “They might have been all right when your friends did their kitchens," Rodrigo said.  "What was that,two years ago? But they’re a different outfit now. Too many clients, too many workshops, a new manager-”
            “Who doesn’t return phone calls?”
             He sighed. 
             I sighed.
             In the kitchen, something heavy fell on the tile floor. Someone swore. I put my head back in my hands. “I’ll get Mr Tabubil to call from his office,” I said. “His office switches up the numbers on outgoing calls. The kitchen company can’t keep up.”

At the end of the day it took some serious legal lawyering to get the apprentices out and the kitchen anywhere near finished.  Outside the kitchen, the general contracting was also going swimmingly, on account of how the same day the apprentices arrived with the countertops, our plumber hooked up the new pipes in the laundry, and sealed and painted the wall up behind him – without stopping to leak-test the new seals. Our downstairs neighbors had a bathtub’s worth of things to say about that.
            So did the elderly lady four floors below, who was complaining of a great big waterfall coming through her kitchen ceiling. It was definitely there. It just vanished when other people came around. Why was the floor dry?  It was dry because the puddles drained away through the floor while we were ringing the doorbell.  The only cure was going to be a brand new kitchen of her own – we had some rather nice designers we could pay to do one for her, didn’t we?

Happy Halloween!

We have descended into the dark underbelly of the kitchen construction industry, and are only just beginning the long claw out.  Posting shall remain sporadic.  Eat some horseradish and sirachi sauce off of a skull, and pretend you're down here with us.

Happy Halloween!

My day was AWESOME. With Bonus Electricians.

Posting is sporadic at the moment.  For my laxity, I apologize, but renovations, once begun, seem to keep on happening, and one day you wake up to find that your electrician has interpreted “I want this light and this other light both on the same circuit and both controlled by this switch right here” as instructions to pull the wiring for the second light out of the ceiling and paint and plaster the ceiling up behind him.

My day today was awesome.  It went sort of like this:
            "Hi Julio, my redoubtable electrician friend!  Where is everyone?"
            "Hello Señora Tabubilgirl! The floor people came, but then they went away again.  They seemed worried about something.  They said they were going to call you.  Enrique the plumber is off sick. The kitchen installation people haven't come at all, but that's okay, because neither did the ceramicist, and we can't do the kitchen installation till the he puts the last corner tiles put in, so that's a good thing.  But don't you worry, Señora Tabubilgirl!  Right now I'm just finishing up the kitchen outlets, but after that, I will do all the tiles myself!  And O Look - here are the floor people now!"
            The floor people were worried.  About two things things. The first of which they wanted to show me right away.  And that ended up in a phone call to our general contractor, which went like this:
            "Rodrigo! Where are you!"
            "In the car!  Going places!  Buying paint for the painters!"
            "There's just a little problem with the bedroom floors and I'd like to see you here as soon as possible!"
            Rodrigo is a good contractor.  He knows a client in a tail-spin when he hears one.  He was on-site in less than ten minutes flat.

            "Hel-lo, Rodrigo!  How are you this fine morning!  Remember how we went to rather a lot of trouble to level the floors and take out the hollows and downward leaning slopes?"
            "Yes?"
            "Right.  So why exactly, after all that leveling is there now a great big upward hump in the middle of the master bedroom floor?"
            "Ah. That's just where the old slab meets the new slab. The floor guys expected a little variation.  Anything up to half a centimeter.  Where are the floor guys, anyway?"
            "Rodrigo, this ruddy great hump is a lot more than half a centimeter!  See?"
            "Oooooh. Oh. Yeah. My word, that IS a big hump. Eight centimeters?  My word. Well, it's not that wide... I reckon we can knock that out, no worries."
            And Julio was duly hauled out of the kitchen and handed a hammer and a chisel.
            Rodrigo looked at me. "Where are those floor people, Tabubilgirl?"
            "Oh, they went away again.  That was the second thing.  They've lost the floor."

We went into the kitchen for a tour of inspection.  And a spit-take.  Rodrigo bellowed.
            "Julio!"
            Julio appeared, chisel in hand.
            "Would you care to explain" Rodrigo said, blinking rapidly, "what you are doing to those electrical outlets next to the sink?"
            "Well, Señora Tabubilgirl wanted two of them. I just finished screwing the cases on so that the installers can come in, just like you asked me to."
            "But why aren't they level?"
            "But they are level!"  Julio was stung.  "You've both made such a fuss about level - I even used the bubble level to make sure that they are perfectly level with the floor!"
            "They’re not level."
            "They are level!  I measured them myself! 
            Rodrigo gathered himself visibly. And let it all out with a rush. "They're side by side-" he hollered, "two centimeters apart, and one of them is three-quarters of a bloody centimeter higher than the other one!"
            Julio looked at him and looked at him and there was absolutely no compromise in his eyes. I could see Rodrigo looking back, and deciding that there were some battles that were just not worth the winning.  Fixing this would involve taking off a lot of tile, and a lot of grout – and considering how lucky we were to have those outlets in the first place* I was inclined to agree with Rodrigo.  Under the circumstances, however, I wasn't entirely sure that I was comfortable with Julio finishing up the tile work before the kitchen installers came.
            "Oh, that's not a problem."  Rodrigo looked happier that there was something to be happier about.  "I've just heard from the ceramicist and he's promised to come in today to finish it all off." 
            Rodrigo’s phone rang.  "Speak of the devil -  Where are you? Downstairs?  Fan-tastic."  He hung up and looked at me.  "Good thing those kitchen installers haven't come in yet.  Where are those boys?  Aren’t they supposed to be here by now?  Speaking of where things are – or aren’t - how'd they lose the floor?"
            I sighed.  "According to the floor people, the floors were delivered here on Friday.  They even have a signature on the delivery slip. Only we didn't get them, and there's no record with the building manager downstairs, so now they're off trying to figure out who actually took delivery."
            Rodrigo’s rather rapt contemplation was interrupted by the arrival of the ceramicist.
            "Don't mind me."  The man said.  "I'm just here to get my stuff.  I've got my boys waiting downstairs in the truck.  We've got another job."
            Rodrigo inhaled alarmingly, and I fled back toward the bedroom and Julio and his chiseling. When I came out again, the ceramicist was looking tightly unhappy, and lowering a tile into a puddle of cement with a rather... teenage look on his face. 
            He did not, however, stick around.  The most we got out of him was the rest of the tiles cut to size. 
            "I will stick them in myself" Rodrigo said, sniffing in a faintly teenager-ish fashion himself. "The tiles can be wiped clean easy enough, and the grout tidied up after the cabinets go in - if we can get the cabinets installed…”
            "I'm calling the kitchen people now."  I assured him, and Rodrigo went off to greet the painters, who were arriving in a cheerful mob, and Gods bless them, settling down to do some actual painting.
            I called our contact at the kitchen store.
            "Oh, hello" She said vaguely. 
            "We were expecting the installers this morning..."
            "Oh.  Right.  You mean they're not there?"
            "Nope."
            "Huh. So do you want them tomorrow then?"


* First we showed Julio the detail design specs and he agreed that they were good.  Then I took a sharpie marker and drew little boxes on the wall where each outlet would go, and he agreed that that was a sensible precaution. Then I wrote “enchufe” (outlet) with my sharpie right next to each of the boxes – and he went and plastered the wall smooth over the top of all of it and had the ceramicist start laying tiles right there.  While he went and rewired the switch for the ceiling lights to run the dishwasher.  I'm not joking.