very simple

On Monday morning, I tried to postpone my move, but the moving company was having none of it, being that it’s the end of the month, in the summertime, when, apparently, everyone in the city is trying to move at the same time. So my contractors have been totally busting their asses trying to get my floors sanded, painted and varnished (and dry!) in time for tomorrow afternoon, because, really, if the floors are done it’ll make moving so much easier.

On top of everything else, my appliances are supposed to be delivered today. and the store is one of those places where you have to call in the morning and get your estimated delivery time. So I call this morning and get a time of 10:45 to 2:45 today. Okay, fine. I call my contractor, who says that’s fine – they’ll hold off on painting the living room floor until 3pm, let that dry, and then varnish it in the morning – the varnish takes about 2 hours to dry, and since my movers aren’t coming until the afternoon, it works out perfectly.

Except for one thing. 2:45 rolls around and the delivery guy is nowhere to be found. I call the store, and am told that "I’m the next stop and he’s on his way". Finally, 4:00 rolls around, my contractor (Giuliano) calls to tell me that they had to go ahead and paint the floors even though no one has shown up, and they were leaving since they couldn’t walk around the apartment anymore (obviously). (You have to also understand the tone of these conversations – Giuliano is Italian, and speaks with an incredibly thick accent – I can’t understand half of what he says, and I’m pretty sure that he can’t understand me half of the time. So most of our conversations involve us shouting at each other, not because we’re arguing, but because we’ve become so consumed with over-enunciating everything that we turn into caricatures – I’ll just speak louder and that’ll make it easier for him to understand me. Oh, and we’re both on cellphones, so the ugly *loud* cellphone talking voice doesn’t help things along either. The flip side? he does such beautiful work that I actually started crying with joy the first time I saw the bedroom painted.)

So I call the store, where they claim that the guy showed up at, like, a minute after 4. Where he was turned away by the doorman because (surprise!) my floors were wet. I, of course, immediately launch into argumentative lawyer mode, blame the whole thing on the store (it was because they showed up so late that my guys had to paint the floor ahead of them, blah blah blah). In the end, not only did they agree to redeliver for free on Thursday morning, including getting me first priority on the 9am truck, they’re refunding my delivery fee for today. Given that Thursday’s probably a better day for everyone anyway, that turned out well.

In the meantime, I actually had to go this morning and buy more boxes. And that’s with throwing out about 10 big black reinforced Hefty bags full of trash in the last two days. I swear, one of these days I’m going to turn into the Collyer Brothers. 

Tags: bitching, home improvement, real estate