demo is happening

 Okay, this might wind up being a cluster, I don't know. 

About 9 am the guys I think of as the "B team" (Marteen's assistants, the ones with not much English) showed up. No sign of Marteen. One guy handed me a phone and I spoke to Martin through it, and he told them what I told him.

Right now I hear tile being broken out and I am seeing them cart it off. I have to repeat to myself over and over again "they won't just demo and leave, they won't just demo and leave" but right now I have little faith that my kitchen will be right again.

I don't like this. This has been the most self-inflicted stress I've had in a long time. I've got my Pandora classical channel blaring in my ears which covers a little of the noise and the constant phone talking they are doing (I don't know if they're getting guidance or are just talking; I really don't understand much Spanish. I did hear one guy say something like "there's no place to move the stove and the fridge to, there's a table in the dining room" and yes, I had to move everything I could pick up and put it in the dining room, I'm sorry.

the other guy came in, saw the guy working and said jokingly "Easy, Papi!" which I guess means he thought the other guy was going at it a bit hard.

I also just heard the word "plywood" (I guess it's the same in Spanish and English), maybe they are talking to Marteen.

I suppose the answer is to not try to figure it out and just trust it will get done but I am not good at trusting that way. 

Oh but I want this completed properly so badly. I want the subfloor fixed and the new tile put down and everyone gone and me to get my life back. Already I am probably going to have to miss the "symposium" that I forgot about being tomorrow. There's supposedly a Zoom link and I sent an e-mail to the person in charge of it ASKING for it but they've not replied, but if my kitchen's not done? I can't go* and sit in a room all morning tomorrow and be talked at - I can't even wait until the guys get here because the thing starts before they usually do.

(*Nor do I really want to, given the low vaccine uptake in some departments. I know everyone in my department is at least 2-sequence vaccinated, most are boosted, and a few of us are doubly boosted, but it ain't the same everywhere).

The better news is that thanks to a small loan from my mom, I now have sufficient cash (and cash AVAILABLE, I checked online this morning) that I could write the check for the FULL remaining amount (provided there are no horror shows at the last minute that raise the price, but even then I still have the six-month window) once this is done AND the demolition dumpster is gone. And yes, I think I'm going to make paying it all off contingent even on that last thing, although the city needs to take the Dumpster - if they don't listen to the guy the first time about retrieving it, he will need to call it in again. I'm not counting on the city listening to me; one thing I've learned about here is if you have a treble voice, you're less likely to be listened to.

I think my recommendations to people planning renovation would be:

- see if you can live without doing it (!) or if you can do it yourself. I am painting my sewing room myself even though I probably could shell out the couple hundred more dollars it would take to hire someone, because I can do it on my own schedule. 

- move out of your house while it's being done if you can. Outdoor reno is a LOT easier than indoor, though - the whole house painting thing was not so bad despite the noise of the new siding being put on and the plastic taped over the windows for the better part of a week. 

- move as much stuff out of your house as you can. Heck, get RID of half your stuff, that's what I should have done first.

- at least if you live where I do, learn Spanish first, because most of the workers have Spanish as their first language, with varying degrees of English. Or have someone who can translate. I find not being able to easily communicate stressful. (That said, if they were, say, recent German immigrants, I'd probably have nearly as much trouble. Maybe slightly less if they were French-Canadian... and yes, if you are learning a second language in the US, with VERY few exceptions, Spanish is almost certainly the most practical and helpful for Anglophones to learn)

- get everything clearly in writing (one of the miscommunications was that the head guy had verbally changed something and I didn't "hear" him on it, and we had to straighten that out. It worked out in my favor, I guess, but it was stressful). 

- have someone who can be at home the whole time so if workers are delayed you're not sweating about getting to work

- Probably: hiring a general contractor, though expensive, is better than you having to coordinate five different "guys and his truck" and also, in my experience around here, a "guy and his truck" operation takes on lots of jobs and they hopscotch between them - I know someone who went nine months before her kitchen was finished because the guy she hired kept haring off on other jobs. And yeah, i get it, that new construction is *simpler* but to me it feels wrong to leave a homeowner hanging with half-finished work. At least I will say with a few bumps in the road this work got done fairly smoothly. (Well, we'll see: the kitchen isn't done yet and I feel like I should cross my fingers and spit to avoid having jinxed it now)

A couple photos:

Partway through. At least they left the fridge plugged in:

And here it is with all the tile gone. They're taking a break now so I don't know if that means they're going to effect some kind of repair tonight (though they seem to have no supplies, and certainly none of the tile) or if Martin/Marteen is being summoned to do part of it. 

Still, I think I'm gonna have to get carry out tonight. I managed to grab something for lunch quickly while they were eating their lunch (they brought their lunch and ate out on my lawn) but doing anything more complex than zapping something in the microwave won't be possible. And I'm not sure I want to deal with it anyway.

the problem is there's not much good "non heavy" carry out in our town - there's pizza, of course, but that's too much bread and cheese. And barbecue, but that's also more heavy than what I want. And I"m very leery of salad from anywhere given the recent outbreaks of various food poisonings (I don't eat salad myself at home: I get my greens cooked). I might be able to choke down a grilled chicken sandwich, that seems like the least bad option....