Not the best weekend ever...

I booked yesterday off work to give myself a long weekend. My long weekend was not exactly what I hoped. Saturday, as I've already mentioned, I broke my glasses and Valentines ended up being spent at Oakridge mall. Sunday I came down with an absolutely brutal sinus headache. It's been a few years since I had one like that. I spent most of the day in the bedroom with the lights out. Monday the headache was mostly gone (down to tolerable levels) and I spent the day recovering the cat post, fixing the holes in my coat pockets, working on the new Gothic BC Forum (which is looking pretty good now), recording an old movie for my mom, and other such ordinary stuff. Actually Monday was a pretty good day exept that I got outbid for Mr. Big's suit

Back to the Fire

They are removing the rest of the fire-escape today, as you can see here:





Which means that they will be starting to attach the new one soon. I was speaking to the super about it this morning and I am not at all enthusastic about this. They are going to have to rip holes in the plaster of the wall of the room where my computers live. This is going to mean a lot of dust, probably some power outages, and may necessitate moving my desk. If you have seen how my desk and how it is set up you'll know what a pain in the ass this will be. It's a large, old desk that I inherited from my father to which I have added a hutch. It sits on 10 cm high blocks to raise it to a level that is comfortable for me to work at so it isn't just a matter of sliding it over. Also making sliding it over an impossibility are all the cables for my gear, many of which don't have enough slack in them to move that far. Moving my desk a metre will mean several hours of disassembly, recabling, and reassembly - all to be repeated when I move it back. When I was freelancing I would have charged $90/hr for this kind of work. I should bill the people at fault for this.

And of course the fault here lies with the crappy "restoration" company (Barclay Restorations) and their apparent inability to plan, well, anything. They've known for a year that this needed to be done, and it could have been done a year ago before all the apartments on the north wall were plastered and painted. The apartment the fire was in and all the apartments below it, the apartment across the hall from the fire (above ours) and the ones below ours all had to have all the plaster removed because of smoke and water damage. Now that this has all been done they will be ripping holes in the plaster they just finished putting up and painting. Our apartment and the one above us were vacant for months after the fire (ours was vacant for four months, the one above for nearly a year) so holes could have been made and fixed a year ago without inconveniencing anyone other than the guy in the apartment across the hall from Nat's old place (who has since moved out and someone else has moved in). Now all of the 8 apartments affected are "finished" and occupied.

After 16 months of this I'm getting a little fed up. Looking at their website they claims their "project managers are very organized and efficient" yet I see no evidence of this. They have claimed ignorance in working on a building as old as this one yet the website brags about having restored Hy's Mansion after a fire and having restored that brilliant old building at Nicola and Beach. To me it appears they are milking the insurance money as they do almost everything twice and cut corners where-ever they feel they can get away with it.

Unclear on the concept.

I am fed up. Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't the idea of painting something to make it look better? I just went out on the balcony to have a look at the paint job the guy did Monday on the door and window trim. It looks like utter crap. In fact it looks worse than it did before they painted. None of the holes are filled, none of the nails sticking out were pulled. I couldn't see any of this until now because they also put another coat of deck paint on the balcony and it wasn't dry enough to walk on until now. Fuck. I knew I should have sanded the wood and filled the holes myself. Then I wouldn't have ended up with ( this )

I had a long talk with the super about the crappy work being done. Nonetheless, I do believe I will forward these pictures to Barclay "Restorations".


Addendum 0402162318:
I mailed the same pictures, complete with sarcastic comments to the owner of Barclay Restorations.