Not quite a dawn duel … and not many gentlemen around … but my weapon of choice was “the plans”, kitchen guy’s weapon was “defensive cocky attitude” … the plans won!
It was a pretty tense confrontation … the kitchen guy implying that if I wanted something built to plans then I needed to ensure that every single measurement was on the plan … which I called bullshit on … the plans were drawn to scale by a professional, the majority of the measurements were on the plans … and doing hideous things is not acceptable.
It has been agreed that the draw fronts will be replaced … that took quite a bit … but it is on the plans! The draw fills will be changed (he tried to convince me that it was standard to be given half a cupboard!), the glass in the overheads would be changed – had a great win on that one – I asked him to check his paper work, there it was in black and white, the glass was opaque not clear! The rangehood top will be fixed … though I decided that rather than rely upon them to get the correct corbel, I would order them myself. For a $20 item that makes an impact it was not worth the effort of trying to get them to do them … I’m sure I can work out how to paint them and stick them on if they arrive after the builders leave!
He did ask me who I thought would be paying for the changes …I nearly laughed … not me!!!
That was probably my worst nightmare for the whole renovation experience … having to stand up to someone who was trying to bully me into doing what they wanted … and making my lack of knowledge their excuse for doing a bad job. Thank goodness I’m obsessive about lists and paperwork, they just had no excuses with things in writing.
So far they’ve re-done the shelf – interestingly, they had asked the builder to create a template of the shelf bracket, builder draws up a pretty one the first go … but what the kitchen guys have put in is what is on the plan ;-) So they’ve wasted the builders time … and it would have been nice to have the pretty template one, but I’m still so much happier with what is on the plan vs the horrid shelf bracket they put in in the first place.
My side of the argument went something like "it is on the plans", "the plans show", "the plans are drawn to scale, those are the measurements", "on the spreadsheet you were given it says", "there it is on the plan", "there is the enlarged detail on the plan", "check the paper work I gave you, it is written there", "there is the written measurement", "as you can see here on the plan ..." :-) !!!!!
His side of the argument was a whole lot weaker and it just goes to show ... if it is in writing and on the plans ... they can come up with lots of excuses ... but it wont hold! Even though they'll make the changes ... the cupboards/draws will never have the profile exactly how I thought it would look like ... hard to describe but I asked for shaker profile, and the ones I've got are really sort of shallow, with rounded corners - not true shakerish ... but the difference is minor and I don't have anything in writing to define exactly how deep and right angled I wanted the corners (bugger).
At the end of the discussion I left the builder to talk more with the kitchen guy … and I could hear as I left “so why didn’t you build it like it is on the plans?” :-)
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