Contractor Nightmare

About a half hour ago I chewed out the contractor we hired to fix a myriad of problems on our house before the new owners move in. Or, as my husband refers to him, our ass-tractor.

OK, I didn't chew him out face to face, or over the phone, but I did leave a nasty message for him on his voicemail.

As anyone who really knows me well, this is pretty shocking. I am very non-confrontational. Two other times in my life have I truly confronted someone. The first was in my first year of teaching at a Catholic school and I got in a nun's face who was causing some problems for my and my partner teacher's first grade classes. The second was a little incident with my sister-in-law. Other than that, I don't take well to being rude or confronting uncomfortable situations. It doesn't always work well, but it's worked for me most of the time.

Well, today I laid out a verbal ass-kicking on this guy's voicemail. My guess is in other people's view, it wasn't quite an ass-kicking. But to me, it's the most heated I've been in a situation like this, ever.

We hired Al a month ago after getting three estimates for what is essentially two days of work. It is now three days before our closing, and not only is half of the work not done, but they left my sliding glass door in the kitchen in non-working condition. It doesn't completely close, and now my house is in worse shape than it was when I hired this guy.

My realtor is trying to schedule a walk through for the buyers of this house, but keeps having to put it off because we can't get the work done.

This is truly been a nightmare for me. I guarantee I will never hire a contractor again. People say the big stores (like Lowe's, Home Depot, etc.) are killing our small hometown workers. Well, I would rather go with Home Depot or Lowe's and know that my work will get done when they say it will. They may not offer huge variety or individualized things, but they come and install what they say they will when they say they will. It's why I call Sears for a lot of work in the home. They do it and do it well.

I don't know where to go from here. Hopefully we'll get what we need to get done, or the buyers will be understanding and take our money in lieu of everything being done. No matter what, I plan on moving out of here on Monday, and hope to leave this nightmare behind on Spicebush Lane.