What was a well planned week turned into a mess, mainly due to the fact that other people can’t do their jobs properly.  Stu and I are the ones who suffer and I am going to have a good moan about it!

On Monday morning Stu painted the last wall of the new build with the under coat while I went to get the top coat paint.  The client had chosen a colour over the weekend from three tester colours we painted onto the wall, with the tester colours mixed by a merchants in Peterborough.  I took the colour code and got six tins mixed up by the same company of merchants, but in Huntingdon as the Peterborough merchants didn’t have enough base paint to do the colour mixing with.  Looking at the colour in the tins I knew something wasn’t quite right, the colour seemed slightly different from the chosen tester colour.  I was reassured by the sales assistant that the paint computer could not make a mistake as all the branches worked using the same Dulux Trade colour codes.  I got the paint to site and Stu made a start roiling it onto the wall.  After about two rolls, Stu called me over to take a look.  The new paint colour was different to the chosen tester colour.  Huntingdon said they had done nothing wrong and could not help.  I now had six tins of paint that I couldn’t use.  Both Huntingdon and Peterborough merchants didn’t have enough base paint to mix up more colours even if something could be resolved.  So Stu and I travelled over to Dulux Trade in Peterborough.  They had enough base paint and hopefully could resolve our problem.  They mixed up another tester sample with the code I had, which matched the colour I had received from Huntingdon, so we now knew the issue was with Peterborough.  Dulux tried their best but could not match the chosen tester paint.  It seems Peterborough’s paint machine is worked by hand, while Dulux and Huntingdon have totally computerised paint mixing machines, so they held their hands up and confessed they probably made a mistake in the mixing process and produced a totally unique paint colour that could not be matched again.  Nice!

After several phone calls and racing across the country side in the van most of the morning it was now lunch time.  We had a colour the client wanted, but we couldn’t get the colour mixed, and we had six tins of paint of another colour that we didn’t think we could use.  We contacted the client, explained the situation and they were going to pop out to look at the paint colours once more, including the new colour we had from the morning.  After some deliberation, they were disappointed they had to choose another colour but they decided that they liked the paint we had purchased from the morning the best, so that’s the colour that was going to go onto the walls.  The issue was finally resolved but we had lost a day to all the chaos, through no fault of my own.

Tuesday we got the all the exterior painted.  Wednesday we took delivery of a balustrade for the first floor exterior bedroom French doors, so we got that fixed onto the wall and into position.  I had phoned the scaffolders the previous week and booked in for the scaffold to be dismantled on the Thursday.  So with this in mind Stu and I cleaned down all the first floor windows before they arrived.

Thursday morning we were pottering about waiting for the scaffolders to arrive.  There wasn’t much we could do as we didn’t want to get in their way, but by 10.30am there was no sign of them.  I phoned them up to find out the latest.  The latest was they wouldn’t be out this week!  The lorry had been off the road for two days earlier in the week and they were behind schedule, and they had decided not to let me know this minor little fact.  I had planned our whole week around the scaffold coming down on Thursday only to find out mid morning on the Thursday they wouldn’t be coming out.  The best they could do was the following Monday.  I did explain my situation to them and asked why they couldn’t have let me know what was going on.  I basically got the phone version of a ‘shrug of the shoulders’, but they weren’t bothered.  Maybe they will be bothered when I use a different company next time.  At this moment it looked like Stu and I were on for a long weekend.  I made some phone calls, and Mr M at Yaxley was ok for us to bring his fence panel job forward to the Friday which I had originally planned for the following week.  So I then had to re-schedule the whole of next week’s work to fit in around the scaffolders, again!  Friday we were in Yaxley and got Mr M’s new fence posts and fence panels in, so he was happy.

What a week.  The only two companies/services that I used this week and both of them made a mess of things.  I was the one who had to pick up the pieces and re-schedule our work plans.  I was the one who lost the time and money due to their inefficiencies.  I was the one running around trying to get everything sorted.  Obviously they won’t want my business in the future.

WHY CAN’T PEOPLE DO WHAT THEY SAY THEY ARE GOING TO DO?  IT’S VERY SIMPLE, IT’S NOT ROCKET SCIENCE!!