A "Soggy Homecoming" Revisited ...

This is a follow up to my "Soggy Homecoming" post dated June 30th. As you may or may not recall, my husband and I returned from a pleasant weekend trip to New Orleans, and were greeted by a soggy ceiling in our dining room.

It seems that condensation from our air conditioning unit, which is in the attic, filled the drip pan, which in turn overflowed and soaked the ceiling in the dining room. Evidently, water dripped from the ceiling all weekend while we were gone and soaked part of the oriental rug and the pad underneath it.

NOT a pleasant thing to come home to after a fun trip to New Orleans, but I guess it could have been a lot worse. At least the furniture and dining room chairs didn't get wet.

Remember that this was on June 30th, almost a month ago, and since then, we've had the air conditioner repaired and the rug picked up, dried, and cleaned.

We also discovered, not surprisingly, that it's almost impossible to find someone to do a relatively small repair job like this one (small to a contractor, but major to me). We were impressed with the first guy who came to look at it and eagerly waited for him to "call back with an estimate." After waiting three or four days, I called and left a message on his voice mail, asking if he had had time to get the price together, with no reply from him. A couple of days after that, my husband called and left a message, again with no reply. Then, the following week, I left a message asking him to please let us know if he wasn't interested in doing the work so we could contact someone else ... AGAIN, no reply.

I can understand a busy contractor not wanting to tackle a small job when he has several large ones going on, but there's just no excuse for him not calling us back and being honest about it. And to top it off, the second guy who came did the exact same thing!

In my opinion, not only is that no way to run a business, it also shows a lack of respect for potential customers and a lack of just "plain old good manners."

Fortunately, though, it looks as if our contractor story is going to have a happy ending. A couple of weeks ago, a neighbor whose husband builds houses gave us the name of a contractor they highly recommend. I called him and he immediately came by and gave us an estimate right then, which we accepted.

He said he would be here at 7:00 a.m., this morning, and at 7:00, on the dot, he and his crew arrived and immediately went to work.

This is my dining room before the damage occurred ...

This is the way it looked when they got here this morning (we pushed all the furniture out of the way and I covered the chandelier with plastic bags) ...

They covered the floor with drop cloths, covered the furniture with new plastic cloths, and taped new plastic cloths over the openings leading to the rest of the house. So far, so good ...

And, bless their hearts, they even vacuumed and cleaned up their mess before they left for lunch. That, along with the NEW plastic, really made an impression on me.

The contractor just finished applying the "mud" to the sheet rock and will be back later this afternoon to "skim" it, which means that he will apply a thin coat of plaster, as I understand it.

I won't bore or depress you with any more of these ugly "in progress" pictures. Hopefully, if all goes according to plan, they should be finished by Thursday, and I can put my dining room back together before the weekend.

I think every cloud has a silver lining, and I guess the silver lining from this "cloud" is that the next time we need a contractor, we'll know who to call to get the job done professionally and efficiently.

It's just really disheartening, though, that it's so difficult to find professionals these days, in any field, who take pride in their work and do what they say they're going to do.