Home Improvement

Late last week, they finally completed my new roof.  I had put a new roof on last March, just before the coronavirus pandemic sent everything into a lockdown, paying the cost out of my own pocket.  But then a big tree fell on my house during Hurricane Zeta late last October.  After much fussing and negotiating with contractors and the insurance company, they finally started reframing the roof, replacing broken beams and rafters, and then late last week, the shinglers came by and completed the roof. They did a good job.

What remains to be done is completing the siding, facings, and soffits, and then putting up new gutters. Brickwork needs to be repaired on one wall in the back of the house and the rear (kitchen) door needs replacing.  Meanwhile, inside the house, cracked ceilings in several rooms need to be replaced.

They were scheduled to come by and vacuum out all of the blow-in insulation in my attic tomorrow to reduce the mess when they take the drywall down on my ceilings.  It's more than a little ironic that they're finally getting around to that step now on what is probably the coldest week of this winter.  The lead contractor assured me that I'd noticed the difference, and that without any insulation in the attic my furnace would run 24/7 and the house would still feel noticeably cold.  

But worst of all, they had no scheduled plans on when they were going to come back and actually drop the ceilings.  They certainly had no plans for doing the work this week.  I could have been shivering inside an uninsulated house for days or even weeks.   In fact, they weren't even sure of the schedule for completing all of the remaining exterior work.  We had a long talk on the telephone this afternoon, and the longer we talked the more I became convinced that they had no real schedule or strategic plan on when or how they were going to complete this job.

As a former Project Manager, I found this unacceptable.

I argued that we shouldn't be removing the insulation until immediately before we were scheduled to replace the ceilings, and that in the meantime we should be completing the exterior work.  We postponed the vacuuming of the insulation until we know when we're going to replace the ceilings, and I told them that's a lower priority to me than completing the exterior work.  

The contractors seemed put off that their customer, instead of being a complaint, passive receptor of their plans (such as they were), was actually taking the lead on project scheduling, but in the absence of any strategic planning, someone had to take a lead.  After all, this is my home, and a man's home is his castle.