Tuesday 19 November 2013

Day 2: A bit of pipe work.

The last kitchen I had ripped out and replaced took 9 days. They started on the Monday and finished around midday on the Thursday of the following week. The bathroom in that house took 4 days. The vans were sat outside my house ready to start work at 8.30 and they didn't quit until around 5. All the trades required on any given day would all show up together, argue over which radio station to listen to, make an unholy mess and then clean up at the end of the day.
The kitchen was bigger than this one. The job got done in minimum time, fairly efficiently.
So, this time round the kitchen and bathroom are being done at the same time, and it's going to take 3 weeks.
Why?
The work is slightly different. There's some structural stuff to do - a wall needed to come out. That was done yesterday. They arrived at 9.30 and were long gone when I got home at 3.00. Today was some plumbing work and no-one was here when I went out at 11.00. I passed the keys to a tenant liaison person and hoped the work might get done. When I got home at 3.00 there was soldering and stuff going on in my kitchen and he'd "got here about an hour ago." A simple communication would have sorted that. I should have known to not expect anyone this morning, and I should have known that yesterday at the latest.
He took another hour or so to put some pipes in, make a hole in the wall and take out the bathroom sink. The sink is in bits, sitting in the front garden.
Apparently the trades don't like working alongside each other, so a plumber can't be working while there are sparkies working, and the plasterers make a mess.
This would be why it's going to take 3 weeks then.
This is work being done towards the end of a program of ongoing improvements, and as such I would expect lessons to have been learned and timings to have been sharpened. It should be possible to have all this done in 2 weeks, maybe with an extra day for the structural stuff, or for last minute fixes at the end. Three weeks is excessive and a waste of resources.
Tomorrow I expect electricians to rewire the kitchen, which was rewired 2 weeks ago as part of the whole house rewire. Why they couldn't have incorporated that into the whole program I have no idea.
So, thinking abut it, it's not 3 weeks, it's more like 4.

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