Adventures in Home Ownership

It's apparently some kind of law that I can't get work done on my home without there being a screw up. In the case of my roofing, the screw up was minor, wouldn't have cost me anything, and the contractor is jumping over backwards to fix it. Good on them!

So what happened? Basically a failure to communicate.

Two weeks ago I signed all the paperwork for my roof to be reshingled. This amounted to four work orders:

1. Reshingle my half of the duplex.
   
2. Replace the eavestroughs on my half of the duplex.
   
3. Reshingle my garage.
   
4. Replace the eavestroughs on my garage.

It had to be this way because they're separate structures and because the crews who do the shingling are not the same as the crews who replace eavestroughs.

Friday they parked the garbage bin on my property and hauled all the shingles onto the roof of the duplex. Monday they tore off all the old shingles and replaced them with new ones.

And Wednesday they hauled the garbage bin away. This struck me as inefficient, so I asked the guy hauling the bin away why they were taking it before it the work was done. "I just take the bins where they tell me." This was my first inkling that something was wrong. That afternoon I get a call from the company.

"We were just checking to see if you were satisfied with the job," they asked.
"I'm satisfied with the work so far, but I am curious as to when you were going to do the rest of it."
"Rest of it?"
"Yeah, you shingled the main building, not the eavestroughs and nothing on the garage."
"I'll have someone get back to you."

A few minutes pass.

"Hi, I wanted to apologize for our mistake. You signed four work orders, but only the first one got to us. I have all four of them now and we'll have a crew out there to reshingle the garage tomorrow."
"And the eavestroughs?"
"They're a different crew and they're booked solid this week - they should be by next week though."
"Fair enough. Thanks for getting back to me with a solution so quickly."
"Once again, I'm really sorry."

Returning from my morning jog this morning, I see that the bin has returned. Hopefully they'll be some progress on the garage roof when I get home from work this evening.

It's nice when mistakes don't happen. People being imperfect though, mistakes will happen. In that case, I'm happy to see people step up to fix them. That's the sign of professionalism. It's a nice changes to some of the contractors I've had in the past (I'm thinking of you, Roto Rooter).