Damage Control

It’s exciting to see progress being made. The drywall is hung, the front porch is shaping up, and debris is being cleared away. Unfortunately, it hasn’t all been good news. During cleanup, one of the drywallers stepped on a loose drywall screw and punctured one of the radiant pex tubes in the floor. While it’s possible this could be patched, it would be better to re-run the whole loop and be confident it won’t spontaneously start leaking down the road and ruin floors, ceilings, structure, etc. Each floor has six pex loops that are roughly 200 feet of tubing. The puncture is on the second floor in the main bedroom closet, but that loop goes clear down the hall into one of the front bedrooms, because of the layout I designed to make each loop as close to the same length as possible. The damaged loop is the yellow one in the plan if you follow the link.

So, since I don’t have a radiant heat contractor to fix it for me, I ordered another 200′ of tubing, disconnected and removed the ends that connect to the manifold, carefully pulled up the whole loop while draining it into a bucket, vacuumed out the track, re-caulked it with the heat transfer caulk, hammered in the new pex tubing, re-filled and reconnected the line.

While I was making these repairs, it occurred to me I haven’t covered all of the other damage the contractors have done of late. Let’s rewind the clock back to the holidays. We went to visit family as the work on the siding was wrapping up and the electrician was working on the EMT conduit. My front door has a smart deadbolt that I can control remotely, but the door latch was starting to get a bit weak (it’s on a heavy door, after all). I probably should have sprung for mortise locks, but that’s another matter. Anyway, the deadbolt failed to unlock occasionally. The electrician couldn’t get in one morning and we weren’t home, so we unlocked the basement door where he could get a key to the back sliding door.

We got back to discover that the threshold to the fiberglass sliding door had been completely shredded. An image of the wheeled toolbox that the electrician hauled around popped into my head, but he never fessed to it. I told the GC and he sent over one of his guys to figure out how to repair it. I gave him the information on the manufacturer and distributor and waited. And waited. I knew it had taken a while to get the windows and sliding door in when we ordered them originally so I was pretty patient, but after a few months I asked the GC about it, who asked his guys, and no one apparently had any recollection of this problem or doing anything about it.

Despite my frustration, I took his advice and emailed the manufacturer myself, which initiated a new waiting game of weeks and weeks of follow up after follow up. Finally, I managed to get an order submitted and paid for. The delivery was surprisingly quick after that. Rather than endure more delays, I just fixed it myself, first removing the door and the fixed side and pulling out the existing threshold. I discovered the next challenge was fitting the new threshold in. I didn’t want to crack it (fiberglass is strong but a bit brittle), and there wasn’t much flex in the sides. I wound up trimming it slightly short so it would fit in, and then caulking the gap. Finally, after six months of walking around the house to get in because we couldn’t use the back door, it was repaired. I also replaced that door latch, so the front door is good now.

Next up was drywall delivery. The truck driver insisted he couldn’t fit into the alley and craned the drywall in from the street. The drywallers opened up the casement windows on the second floor and attic to crane it in and somehow managed to disconnect the arm that operates the window and then leave it that way. This one was at least relatively easy to repair, but it involved unscrewing the track from the bottom of the windows, and then the screws didn’t screw back in securely without adding some glue. Worse than this, the driver managed to break our neighbor’s car window as he hoisted drywall over it. We didn’t know this right away because he didn’t confess and we had to discover it from photo evidence later.

Most recently, today, I went to remove the piece of drywall in the master bath shower area that I had asked them not to drywall. Imagine my surprise when I removed a screw and water started shooting out of the wall! They had managed to puncture the copper water pipe that goes to the overhead shower head. As luck (forethought?) would have it, I’d splurged on a shower valve body with integrated shut-off valves and was able to turn this off without having to leave the water shut off for the whole house. I texted the GC to hopefully have the plumber come out and fix this. This wouldn’t have been an issue if (a) the plumber had used one of the metal plates designed specifically to prevent this, (b) the drywallers hadn’t put drywall there in the first place, where I had asked them not to and clearly tile backer should be, or (c) I had managed to finish putting the tile backer in before they started.

In summary, contractors are frustrating. They break things a lot and they often don’t even tell you. Over the years, there have been many other incidents. I’ve been operating throughout the contractor process with the idea that making it an adversarial relationship would make things worse, but it’s hard to stay calm and positive in the face of ongoing damage to a house we’ve spent so much time, effort, and money on.