Climbing the Walls Over a Floor

Sounds like a country song doesn't it?

To prevent myself from typing the same thing twice here is a portion of an email to my friend Par:

The two installers got here, walked around on the floor a few minutes and said it might not work. They said it is an old house (no, couldn’t be, we haven’t been but 30 years – and the previous two owners didn’t think of it as an old house either) and the floor is lumpy – so say the least. The floor to be installed is cherry wood lamented.

They said because the floor is, well “lumpy” the lamented might move some when you walk on it, but the pad underneath will absorb some of the movement so people will “hardly” notice it.

They said of course, they wouldn’t know until they actually put it down.

We will see.

I told them to go ahead – what else could I do? I called Anna at work at she in turn is calling Home Depot to raise hell. The man who came out to do the measurements and look for quirks should have noticed the lumpyness.

Between the paragraphs we went from “we will see” to “we saw.”

One of the workers asked to see the basement underneath the dining room. We went down, he studied it and said he did not think it our structure would support a leveling compound mixture. And he said if they didn’t put it down and just put the lamented planks down in time the tongue-in-groove would break… if it did within a year he would have to come out and fix it and pay for it, and after that, I would have to pay for it… either way, it is needless expense.

I asked him was he a sub contractor for the flooring company and he said yes. I suppose most companies these days have as few employees as possible – why bother when you can sub contract?.... no expensive employee’s benefits…. All for the sake of the bottom line: more beautiful dollars to swim in!

This is getting to be Americans way of doing business now. Home Depot made the sale. They subcontracted a dealer to deliver the materials. Then they contract a flooring company to install it and the flooring company swivels around and subcontracts it to two Latino men to actually do the work. I bet the flooring company gets a bigger chunk of the fee than the two-man Latino company that actually did the work. And it works both ways - the two-man Latino company is probably the only of the three companies involved that lost money and chanced losing more it the floor goes wrong.

They do the work, they the highest risk, and get less money in the transaction. The American Way, the little man gets wallop again!

So, other than the carpet they took up and put in their truck, they put everything back like they found it, picked up their tools and left.

Oh me. Now what?