Another week has flown by without any discernible progress on Chicken House, and it's all my fault as I struggle to clear a few days in my schedule to go down there and oversee the digger. Its obviously even getting to Alberto who sent me a mail on Friday pm, reminding me that he still didn't know what to do with the painters quote, and could Chiasserini start work on the pointing. Again, the former I take the blame for, as I'm still trying to get my head around why painting my little casa should cost the same as half a dozen Tata Nano cars, but the latter, hold on, I only got the estimate on Thursday so that's not fair.
I actually woke up this morning turning this particular mathematical equation over in my head. Here goes, lets see if writing it down makes any more sense: I have a contract with the builder that clearly states that on top of the identified services all additional work costs a certain price per hour, so why do I get fixed price quotes (a corpo), which show neither the number of hours or the price of materials (this was my gripe about the roof insulation all those weeks ago). I guess for re-pointing the materials are minimal (a few buckets of mortar), so that means he wants nearly 3-man weeks just to touch up (not to fully re-point), the front and the side of the house, I mean come on, this is getting beyond a joke.
What else are we doing apart from checking the maths of Italian builders?, not a lot. I didn't even order the new beds, ship the shower from UK or even pick up my sketch book for the kitchen layout. All we did this week was have a few pictures for the bathroom framed. They are by a French artist called Lorioz, and its very hard to find very much info about her. I actually found this print in York, UK last year and since then we have stumbled across a few others. They are all on the same theme, and are an in-joke in our household, we thought they would add a touch of fun to our new bathroom, what do you think? Ciao
these pictures look familiar, I thought I had had them all removed from the internet??
Posted by: MM | May 18, 2009 at 03:49 PM
Great painting, absolutely bumtastic!
It's good to see that all is coming along well, albeit slower than Plan-A, well builders is builders, Non? You could always ask him if he is following the Romulus thingy of " Rome wasn't built in a day ".
Meanwhile, here in St Annes we look out at the gales and rain and sharpen the machete for the attack on the weeds you are cultivating!
Good luck and keep on pushing!
Ian & Kathryn.
Posted by: Ian in St Annes | May 18, 2009 at 08:09 PM