What’s happening?

With my house-build? I don’t know, I really don’t know. But it’s not all negative, as I’ll go on to explain.

Our site meeting that was called in order to attempt to resolve my house’s roof problems went ahead as planned last Friday and as expected, the builder attempted to steam-roller me into accepting what I regard as their half-baked solution. But I’m not one to be either bullied or intimidated, as I made clear to them.

So I responded in kind, said that if they intended to propose any solution that did not involve removing the roof and starting again, we might as well stop talking now and turned to walk away. That got their attention.

So then we started to have a meaningful, albeit tough, dialogue. They still wanted to try to hustle me, however, to accept their solution that would involve the fabrication of a large number of extra components and said they’d be along on the following Tuesday (last Tuesday) to fit them. They said that I’d be fully satisfied with the result.

Yeah, OK, but I’m not that easy. I said no, tell you what, if you’re so convinced, come back on Tuesday with just two samples to show me, then if they’re so good and I am convinced, you can come back and fit the rest. There wasn’t much that they could do other than agree and that’s how things were left.

But I don’t think they realised that the match was far from over. On Saturday I fired over an email making a counter-proposal based on the status quo that would NOT require any additional construction or fabrication. The result was that on Monday I received an email saying that they were seriously looking into it and, of course, nobody arrived back on site on Tuesday with the aforementioned ‘samples’.

This I took as an encouraging sign. Which brings us to this afternoon when I received an unexpected phone call from Didier. To cut a long story short, they’ll be coming over on Monday afternoon to look further at my proposal and see exactly what it involves.

I’m not going to say any more other than if it goes ahead it’ll meet my requirements and I’ll be very happy with the outcome. I also think that it will be sensible for them to accept it because the current impasse is doing neither of us any good and can’t be helping them with their project planning. I’ll let you know what happens on Monday.