I lost a week somewhere.
Don't know where or how but I am officially a week off pace. The good news is that with this blog entry I am caught up for Week 10. And this is our last week...number 11. I think I am happy about that.
I could go into the craziness of school + work + selling a house + moving. But I won't. Suffice it to say - nothing at all.
I will therefore rant about crappy sloppy workers. Last spring about this time we contracted to have an attic fan installed. Cost was about $600 or so. Steep but I wasn't able to do it myself because of time.
Two guys came out. Eastern European - I won't say from where because I don't want them coming back to "be making the red revenge" on us for exposing their scam.
They said they couldn't find a way to tap into a power source so they wired the fan into one of the hall lights. My wife asked them to set the thermostat for 85* to make sure the attic cooled fast enough. They said: "Ees no prawb-lum, we do for you." They got their check and left.
My spidey sense tingled a bit. But I let it go. the fan worked only when we had the hall light on but I thought that I'd get around to fixing it someday.
Now it comes time to sell the house. We have it inspected. The inspector looks in the attic and takes some nice pictures of the Brothers Karamazov's work. They had clipped the line to the light and wirenutted their cable into it. No junction box - just exposed wires and wirenuts. BAD
I fixed that and moved into the depths of the attic...following the cable to the fan where the guys had once again simply wirenutted the bare wires outside the junction box for the thermostat control for the fan. No strain relief...bare wires = BAD
I open the box to install a cable strain relief. They hadn't even connected the thermostat - bypassed it altogether. I fixed it and on my way out of the attic stapled the cable up and out of the way and rewired it into a free circuit. All done, all clean...all in all about 4 1/2 hours of work.
I cleaned up the mess they left.
We paid $600.00 for a fan and some materials we could have bought at Home Depot for $70.00. Being scammed feels bad - part shame and anger mixed with more shame and anger. I really wish there was a way to get even...but revenge is not mine. Instant Karma will find them.
The good thing about the inspector is that he also found rotting posts holding up our patio cover. Now that I am digging them out and replacing them I'm really not sure what has been holding the wood cover up. Yep...that rotted.
It feels good to fix things up - to make things like they should be. I joke that when I get to the end of my honey-do list I will die. The good thing is that the list never gets shorter...no matter how much I do. This means I will live forever or at least long enough to see 2 scam artists from a company in Corona, CA (do I dare publish the name?) get some payback for cheating and lying to people.
Or not...leave that to higher powers.
D_
