Gannonteed
The story so far:
Vicki’s been traveling southeast asia for almost 4 months now. I wanted to have the kitchen finished by the time she got back to surprise her. Work at my new job has been very busy. Vicki decided to come back early and I realized the most I could hope to accomplish by then was to get the drywall up. But when the drywall goes up, it’s very encouraging and exciting. Vicki’s been saying it’d be a lot of fun to paint the walls right after she got back.
I also realized the best situation would be if someone could do the drywall while I’m visiting Vicki in Thailand for two weeks. But I don’t trust the guy who did my drywall upstairs enough to give him a key to my house while I’m out of the country. Not even because I’m afraid he’ll steal my stuff as much as I’m worried he won’t do a good job without me checking his work. And it’s hard to find anyone a cheap as Ramone. But Greg said he could do it for me and at a price comparable to Ramone. It looked like everything was falling into place.
So I’ve been busting my ass for the last couple months in order to get everything ready for the drywall to go up. I’m up late all the time, getting very little sleep and keeping to a strict no-fun diet. Even with the chaos of the holidays right in the middle, surprisingly it looked like I was going to be able to get everything done…
My dad came up yesterday to help me knock off my slowly shrinking list of little things to finish before the drywall can go up. We managed to get all the things done that I had already figured out he could help with. Lot of little jobs: removing the door jamb to the basement, replacing the drain for the tub, putting in wood blocking to hang the kitchen cabinets and microwave on, fixing the loose floor boards upstairs and down, and running some flexible conduit to run ethernet cable through for upstairs. He’s been a tremendous help.
Now I’ve been trying to get Greg over so he can take a look at everything that needs to get done for weeks now. I wanted him to take a look at exactly what he’s got to do and talk about exactly what my budget and schedule is so I could make sure he was okay with everything. He even said he could hook up my gas line for my stove and dryer for me which was very exciting because that was a loose end that I keep forgetting about.
So I finally got him to come over to my house yesterday so he could see my progress. We talked a little about all the work I had gotten done since he last saw it. I showed him the gas line and figured out what I need to pick up from Home Depot for him. I ran over what my budget was and what kind of materials I had left from the last drywall job. And he seemed cool with everything until he was walking out the door and I asked him if he thought he could actually get everything done in two weeks. He asked me “When are you leaving? Well I’m going to be working on my house for another three weeks. So I won’t start until after that.”
Poof. All my dreams were gone.
It’s an incredibly huge disappointment. I’m crushed. I know Vicki won’t really care as much, but I was really looking forward to painting “I love you Vicki” or maybe “Welcome to your kitchen” on a nice big finished wall for the day she got back.
Comments
Oh man! I'm so sorry, Alex. I know how disappointed you must be. You could still make her a welcome home sign....
I'm sure she'll be happy just being back home with you, Mooshu and Ali. :)
Posted by: katie | January 9, 2007 7:33 PM
Awwww, that's so sweet! Everythings working out anyway :)
Posted by: Vicki | January 12, 2007 3:12 AM