k brown
Well-known member
Part of our garage door frame was dry-rotted. Hired someone with ump-teen great Yelp reviews.
Sign-of-Trouble #1 - Guy we hired doesn't come; sends someone else.
SOT #2 - Guy can barely speak a word of (incorrect) English at a time, and seems to barely understand what's said to him (Russian).
SOT #3 - After briefly looking at the issue, spends at least 15 minutes on the phone (in Russian) to someone I suppose is the guy we thought we hired.
SOT #4 - Instead of setting about to crow-bar away the affected 2x6, he starts 'chiseling' away at it with a hammer and screwdriver. I dig out a couple of my own chisels and hand to him; he sheepishly thanks me and mutters: "My wife took my tools".
SOT #5 - Realizing it will take him what's left of this year to chisel the whole thing away, he finally starts to pry the 2x6 away from the door frame, not with a demo bar or crowbar, but a claw hammer!
And so it went - you can guess what happened next - head breaks off the hammer. While digging around in my tool bin for a crowbar, I comment about 'not the right tool for the job'; again he says his wife took his tools.
- I take a break from this agony; when I check back, he's hammering away on the crowbar with the broken-off head of the hammer. I give him one of mine, along with a dead-blow sledge.
- Well, he finally gets the job done, and when he lets me know, I see that in prying away the 2x6, he's sheared off big chunks of the healthy adjacent moulding, which he's glued back only part of. The big gaps remaining he filled in not with epoxy putty, or even wood patch, but with cheap DAP caulk. And not even completely, but with deep recesses at the surface. As soon as he left, I dug all that crap out, to be replaced with the proper stuff.
- Then I see that he re-attached the 7' length of stop-moulding that's on top of the 2x6, not with counter-sunk finishing nails, but two (counted 'em, two) roofing nails; the ones with the huge, flat heads. One near the top, and the other about a foot and a half above the bottom. Nice strip of daylight left between moulding and frame.
Sign-of-Trouble #1 - Guy we hired doesn't come; sends someone else.
SOT #2 - Guy can barely speak a word of (incorrect) English at a time, and seems to barely understand what's said to him (Russian).
SOT #3 - After briefly looking at the issue, spends at least 15 minutes on the phone (in Russian) to someone I suppose is the guy we thought we hired.
SOT #4 - Instead of setting about to crow-bar away the affected 2x6, he starts 'chiseling' away at it with a hammer and screwdriver. I dig out a couple of my own chisels and hand to him; he sheepishly thanks me and mutters: "My wife took my tools".
SOT #5 - Realizing it will take him what's left of this year to chisel the whole thing away, he finally starts to pry the 2x6 away from the door frame, not with a demo bar or crowbar, but a claw hammer!
And so it went - you can guess what happened next - head breaks off the hammer. While digging around in my tool bin for a crowbar, I comment about 'not the right tool for the job'; again he says his wife took his tools.
- I take a break from this agony; when I check back, he's hammering away on the crowbar with the broken-off head of the hammer. I give him one of mine, along with a dead-blow sledge.
- Well, he finally gets the job done, and when he lets me know, I see that in prying away the 2x6, he's sheared off big chunks of the healthy adjacent moulding, which he's glued back only part of. The big gaps remaining he filled in not with epoxy putty, or even wood patch, but with cheap DAP caulk. And not even completely, but with deep recesses at the surface. As soon as he left, I dug all that crap out, to be replaced with the proper stuff.
- Then I see that he re-attached the 7' length of stop-moulding that's on top of the 2x6, not with counter-sunk finishing nails, but two (counted 'em, two) roofing nails; the ones with the huge, flat heads. One near the top, and the other about a foot and a half above the bottom. Nice strip of daylight left between moulding and frame.
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