Missives from the 6th Floor

When we met with John we had a rough sketch of what we wanted, we walked the space (mud) with him, and retired to the dining room, where he re-drew our sketch, dimensioned it, did some math on his sketch, and handed us a time, materials, and total cost estimate. I called a handful of references, and all of them said he was good to his word and did the job on-time and on-budget, so we wrote him an initial check, and watched as the deck took shape in front of us.

There were a couple of issues during construction - the biggest one being that our plan of foregoing a railing and using benches in their stead - which John had suggested and Dawnise and I liked - fell apart once they did the initial frame out and saw how high (off the ground) the down-hill side of the deck would be. John did the benches and the code-mandated guard rail, at no extra cost to us, and no schedule slip.

Our only complaint is that some of the fit-and-finish isn't up to what I would have done were I building it - but given that we paid about half of what our neighbors did for a similar sized deck of the same materials, I couldn't complain too loudly.

Anyway, long story short (too late), when John heard we were looking to get some landscaping done, he recommended one of the guys who worked with him, and based on our positive experience on the deck, we gave him a call.

The initial meeting was similar to the deck - we had a rough drawing - showed it to Steve, and broke the project into phases - drainage first, retaining walls second, grading & topsoil third, and the up-hill side walkway last.

The project was going pretty well 'till Steve broke his leg, which pushed what should have been done in the fall into the winter. And the last couple months have been a bit torturous on both sides.

See, it turns out that John was really good at estimating.

Steve, not so much.

His estimates, time, materials, and labor, have all been off. We've got a bunch of stack stone for the retaining walls left around, we were a couple cobblestones short of a walkway, and I've lost track of how many checks I've written him for sand and topsoil. On the labor side, he's taken a bit of a bath - having put in way more time and back-breaking work than he expected, but mostly sticking to his bid. Oh, and the weather didn't help. A couple of the big storms we had undermined portions of the path he was in the process of laying.

The lack of detailed plans and drawings also hurt us several times - when the path he built wasn't what Dawnise and I though we had described. At one point I just spent an afternoon out there re-stacking retaining walls by my self, rather than try to communicate - again - what we wanted.

About a month and a half ago John had a heart attack, so that paused the project again while Steve and John got the business under control and came up with a go-forward plan, which boiled down to "finish projects in flight and shut it down."

Steve did the last work he expects to do on the walkway yesterday, and started a "real" job today. The path doesn't look bad, but it's not quite what we had in mind. If I get inspired, I may try to fix it, depends on what Dawnise says when she sees it in the light of day. This weekend's task is to grass seed the last bits of top-soil, and start figuring out what to plant in the beds to stem erosion.

Anyway - it's "done" for some definition of done. We'll figure out where we want to put the last of the stack stone, and move on to planting in the spring.

Next project (finally).