When building a house don’t do anything against your better judgment. Every time we have done this, usually for the sake of time, it has come back to bite us. We met with two landscapers. One listened, made good suggestions, but he was more expensive and really busy. The other did not listen, made rather stupid comments, kept saying the same things no matter what we told him, but he was cheaper and available. Being immediately available is at least a yellow flag. Our builder was really pushing to get retaining walls built so we could get the concrete moving. So, against our better judgment we went with the builder’s brother – the one that did not listen.
I met Dennis the landscaper - actually he really just smoothes out the yard and builds retaining walls, aka fine grading - at the house again early on Friday before leaving to go to Eau Claire. It took a lot longer than I thought it would and after explaining what I wanted, even being very direct with him, he still seemed to not listen well. It was to be a simple task. Bring the boulder wall out to about the edge of the garage and then taper the wall with a slight curve to the back corner of the house. We also talked about the weed barrier behind the boulders and I pointed to a few walls around the neighborhood as examples of what we wanted. I signed the paperwork and hurried off.
While I am in Eau Claire I get a call from Dennis telling me he put the wall 4 feet from the house and ran the wall past the first window. I told him to stop, to do no more work that I did not think that was right. When we got to the house on Sunday I popped my top. All Dennis Acker the hard-headed yard grader did was put the wall right where he wanted it to go not where I told him to put it. Plus he used limestone instead of boulders – turns out I signed paperwork stating limestone instead of boulders. This was my bad even though every example and all my conversations had boulders as the examples. But even had we wanted limestone, the crap Dennis brought to the house looked like he got it out of the city dump. It looked nothing like the other limestone used in the neighborhood.
Just to put the icing on the cake, Dennis put several scrapes and a couple of HOLES in the stucco. Nice!
BUILDER TO THE RESCUE
While we have a couple of issues with our builder, he is getting people to build us a nice house and he is a very honest person. When Michelle met with the NEW landscaper (Ziegler out of Deforest) on Monday, he again listened and understood. Michelle then asked Wayne (the builder) how much it is going to cost us to get the limestone out and the walls where we want them. I did sign the paperwork so he was within his right to say that I should enjoy the limestone I just bought. He said, “nothing, we’ll take care of this.” Alright Wayne! Time will tell, but I have no doubt that Ziegler will do a good job.
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3 comments:
Shouldn't it be "grating" on your nerves? I am pretty sure your nerves aren't being graded...or are they? Hmm, are we going to have to talk about you getting an F on your nerves? I am so disappointed...
Dearest braveschica,
A pun (or paronomasia) is a phrase that deliberately exploits confusion between similar-sounding words for humorous or rhetorical effect.
A pun may also cause confusion between two senses of the same written or spoken word, due to homophony, homography, homonymy, polysemy, or metaphorical usage. Walter Redfern has said: "To pun is to treat homonyms as synonyms". Another definition has said that a pun is a word that has two different meanings used simultaneously. For example, in the phrase, "Lee is very punny with all his puns", the pun takes place in the deliberate confusion of the implied word "funny" by the substitution of the word "punny", a heterophone of "funny". By definition, puns must be deliberate; an involuntary substitution of similar words is called a malapropism, or a Bushism.
Puns are a form of word play, and occur in all languages.
So as the yard was being GRADED as in the preparation and levelling of land for construction,and was being done poorly, I used a paronomasia to making light of how TOTALLY PISSED OFF I was.
Were it anyone else I would call total bs, but my dearest father is indeed lame enough to have made this sort of pun in the title of his blog.
Congratulations O King of the Pun!
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