A Tile Tale

Well, these last days have been like a nightmare. My former daughter-in-law, whom I love dearly, asked me to consider hiring her former son-in-law to lay tile on my kitchen floor. She said he had just done a bathroom for somebody and he had done a very good job as she herself had gone to inspect it. She said he was a tile layer and that he needed the money and could do it cheaply for us. We had considered hiring my son’s boss’s husband as he is a contractor, but he like a lot of contractors, was remiss in getting back to us in a reasonable time. We were tired of waiting and wanted to get the job done so we said O.K. They both came over and looked and measured and D…. said he would get back to us also about what his price would be. The first fellow said he worked for $20.00 an hour and it would take about 3 to 4 days. D…finally called with his estimate, which was $1000.00. So long to D…. We are both low-income people so that absurd bid was out of the question. We pondered a couple of days on what we were going to do when D…. called back and said he was a little high on the price and would do it for $400.00. He made some excuse as to why the change, but my son did not relay that to me and we said all right to him doing the job. Well, D…is a hard worker (when he works) and he does a good job (when he works) but this job stretched out into eight days. Eight horrible days. Not only that, but my son told him not to come back for the finishing things that needed to be done as he would do it himself. Our stove has been sitting on the deck all this time and the refrigerator is in the living room and the kitchen table in the garage. We have been living like campers, only worse, as we could not get to stove or microwave to heat anything. We either had to eat cold or go out which was not a good thing for our budget. The first day I offered to fix a sandwich for D…. At that point I could do it, but was told by the d-in-law he did not eat breakfast or lunch. He had told me he ate a big breakfast before coming over so did not need lunch. Who the heck is telling the truth here? Turns out my son had to go daily to Mc Donald’s to get him a burger, fries, and coke. I footed the bill one day. He was offered a cream sickle once and devoured the rest at his own pace each day without so much of a “May I?” Also he asked once for a bottled drink of my son’s and was told sure. Never asked again, but just took and drank them all except a couple. He never worked past 3:00P.M except the last couple of days when he was told he could not leave until certain things had been done for the day. The first day he came at 9:00 A.M. The second day it was 10:00A.M. and the third day it was 11:00 A. M. That day we had to call and ask where he was and why he was not here. Two days he put in a full 8 hours. The rest was 5 or 6 hours. In those hours he probably worked 4 hours, as he was so busy talking on his cell phone. The phone seemed to ring constantly. He would cut the conversation short when I would go look at what he was doing. He took breaks very, very often also. He claimed the guy he last worked for kept his tools and would not return them so my daughter-in-law purchased him a saw, and we had to buy some tools for him also. If she expects to get her money back when he got paid from us she has a surprise coming when she returns from a trip she is on. He took a $150.00 draw before the end and he has a girl staying at the house with him. My d-in-law is letting him stay at her house to dog sit, and I don’t think she knows about the girl. Maybe she does, but he is very secretive about it. While he is working, he makes all sorts of groaning sounds and he also has music plugged into his ears and every now and then shouts out something I assume is some form of the song. He never says goodbye, I am leaving. He just takes off. Most days we have picked him up in the morning after we straightened out his being late, and taken him home, when he quit early, but there has been a fellow come in a car to talk to him and we think he knows the time the guy will arrive and just takes off before we can object. I believe he has gone through my pantry while I was off getting him more grout as we found empty packages of my low calorie snacks empty and discarded on the deck. He sometimes brought his own drinks, but needed more obviously. I do not mind sharing my food or drinks, but would appreciate him asking. The first two days were hard as there was more underlay to be removed than we thought and it was hard to get up so we give him credit for the hard work he did, but again he only put in 6 hours. The day he laid tile should have been done in a day, but it took him two. His constant talking on the cell phone drove us crazy and when his company shut his phone down due to non payment, he used my wall phone walking all over the kitchen stretching the cord and only hanging up when I caught him. Then one day a friend of his called on my phone asking for him. Not a good idea. This last day I went to pick him up he no sooner got in the car than he dialed someone on a cell phone he had. I asked if his was turned back on and he said no it belonged to someone else. I said, well what is that person going to do? He said, “Sleep.” So I assume it belonged to the girl who is staying with him at the house. He proceeded to make another call before we got back to my house. The calls continued. I told him he was addicted and he said, “Not really.” He asked what time my son would be home so he could get paid and said the grout would only take him about an hour to do. It took him three. Another thing that was irritating about him is that he wanted no suggestions, or questions, or to be corrected in any way. If you said anything at all, he sat back on his butt, gave a big sigh and looked away from you. He then became silent and would not talk at all. He has never cleaned up after himself and my deck and some of the flowers are covered with powder from his mixing. The bricks in the yard have an abundance of stuff on them from his mixing. Inside, my cupboards have either grout or that stuff he puts under each tile smeared on them, and some on my hallway floors. Oh so sloppy he was and never ever thought of laying paper or a tarp down. The biggest and most disgusting thing of all is he did not raise the seat on my commode and dripped his last drops on my toilet seat and I had to clean that up.
Here it is five o’clock and my son is on his hands and knees filling in spaces where not enough grout has been applied and discovered one tile is raised above its neighbor, just enough where I might trip, but it is too late to pull it up now. What a lesson we have learned. You get what you pay for my daddy always used to say and he was so right.
I am now writing the day after D... has left. My son and I are scraping the tile glue off the walls, the dishwasher, the windows, (at least three feet above the floor), the door exiting the kitchen,(both inside and out) and the kitchen cabinets. I do not know how this stuff got there, and some so high up on the walls, but I am assuming that when I seen him get mad at himself he would sling his tools. So this is evidently how it got there, but so much of it? Also, the grout has to be washed at least twice and dried, and all the base boards have to be put back in place This was our choice to do as eight days of him was enough. It was, at the very most, a four day job for any other person to do. And even though putting back the baseboards and washing down the finished tile was his job, that would have run into nine days. We still have to apply the sealer ,but we will do that also. Strolling out into our patio area we find he thought that area was the garbage dump. We have picked up wrappers from all the food he took from my pantry and just wadded the wrappers up and tossed them on the ground. There are two waste cans out there. Good riddance to him!