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Supposedly helpful advice
May. 6th, 2011 11:33 amThe floor guy came to start replacing the parquet this morning. Almost immediately, two problems cropped up:
1) The parquet slats he'd brought were 35 centimeters to match the floor, but apparently whoever put in the flooring in the first place had used some slats that were 40 centimeters long for some reason.
2) Some of the sub-floor timbers were still waterlogged and warped.
OK, those are problems inherent to the task, and need to be worked around. New slats, make sure the timbers are dry before laying fresh parquet on them, that sort of thing.
It kinda stuck in my craw, though, to be instructed in what I should have done, immediately, as soon as water started getting in through the walls. As in: being told that the parquet along the entire wall should have been ripped up right away, as though there weren't already a three-by-four-foot hole in the floor, and given that it took this long to track down the leak, and fix it, and ...
argh.
New rule: if you're being hired to fix a problem, the client doesn't want to be called an idiot for not knowing ahead of time what to do. If there's something he can do about it then and there, go ahead and tell him what needs to be done, but telling him "this is what you should have done" is only going to get on his nerves.
Unless you've got a time machine in your tool kit which will let the client go back in time and actually do it.
1) The parquet slats he'd brought were 35 centimeters to match the floor, but apparently whoever put in the flooring in the first place had used some slats that were 40 centimeters long for some reason.
2) Some of the sub-floor timbers were still waterlogged and warped.
OK, those are problems inherent to the task, and need to be worked around. New slats, make sure the timbers are dry before laying fresh parquet on them, that sort of thing.
It kinda stuck in my craw, though, to be instructed in what I should have done, immediately, as soon as water started getting in through the walls. As in: being told that the parquet along the entire wall should have been ripped up right away, as though there weren't already a three-by-four-foot hole in the floor, and given that it took this long to track down the leak, and fix it, and ...
argh.
New rule: if you're being hired to fix a problem, the client doesn't want to be called an idiot for not knowing ahead of time what to do. If there's something he can do about it then and there, go ahead and tell him what needs to be done, but telling him "this is what you should have done" is only going to get on his nerves.
Unless you've got a time machine in your tool kit which will let the client go back in time and actually do it.
