What's this strange thing in my living room?


Is it:

A) The plastic bubble where we keep Daisy so she won't eat peanuts?

B) My hyperbaric programming cage?

C) Our pet, The Blob?

Oh, Blobby, how I wish that it were you. Instead, the answer is D -- none of the above. It's the plastic "wall" that separates the part of the house where we live from the part of the house where the contractors pretend to add another room to our house.

This job started back in March, and according to the "schedule" it should have been finished about three months ago. Of course, anyone who has ever worked with general contractors, knows that you don't believe their schedules. Even though IT'S THEIR JOB TO SCHEDULE THESE THINGS, you regard their schedule with the same skepticism that you would if your dog had come up with the remodeling schedule.

"Rover," you'd say patronizingly, "Suuuuure you'll be done in June. Who's a good-at-scheduling boy?"

But even though everyone knows that dogs suck at the logistics of scheduling subcontractors, somehow you delude yourself into trusting their sweet Golden Retriever eyes, and you fork over the big bucks. I mean, our contractor is really nice! And he seems very loyal too! The truth is, however, even the Border Collie of general contractors is still going waste months of time chasing their own tail instead of installing dry wall. Thankfully, cynics like me don't even trust Border Collies, so in my mind I doubled the time estimate that our contractor gave us.

One of the first things our contractor did was remove the outdoor staircase that gave us access to the backyard and the part of the house that they're adding. So, weeks would go by at a time when we had literally zero visibility into what they were doing. This was a brilliant maneuver on their part. Were they really building a room for us? Was it a dog fighting pit? Was this some reality show where they were trying to test our ability to trust them? We had no idea. Touché, Rover.

It's mostly been downhill since then. Occasionally there'll be a flurry of constructive activity, and then silence for weeks at a time. The last time I heard any work being done it was because they were removing the indoor staircase they had recently built. Apparently it didn't pass the city inspection. Sweet. Prior to that moment, I didn't think construction could go any slower. It didn't occur to me to factor in DEstruction.

So, that's what's up with our new room. In a couple weeks, this job will have taken double what they originally estimated, cruising right past the generous deadline I had in my head, and there's still plenty of work left to be done. Granted, the dry wall is up, but I'm sure it's just a matter of weeks before they take it back down again.

I hate contractors.