To my sister, with love.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Ocean, things are not going so well...

Namely, in France, where, beside the huge fucking fiasco-ey/explosive situation re: the retirement new laws and the demonstrators taking over the country (rightfully so I must say), my sister has also had her fair share of construction disasters. She had just moved into her newly renovated place and was experiencing the typical new house blisssssssss. Until one morning.... when she realized that hot water had become a missing element of her new life in her almost perfect new home. An expert came and stated "the tank is faulty and needs to be fixed/changed". Oh, ok... ahem...

Fixing the hot water tank would not be a problem if it was fully accessible (which it should be, being a very important piece of equipment) but the contractor had the genius - GENIUS I said - idea to hide the tank behind the drywall with no other way to access it than to rip the drywall out. Wow, that is so fucking brilliant... Whoohoo. Party on! Let's make an "elegant" cut in the drywall and see what's wrong with the hot water tank. I mean... Oh. My. God... how stupid is that? The contractor's first measure was to attached a plastic bottle (what a stylish solution. O_o !) on the wall, connected somewhat to the tank, in case water starts to burst out of it. That's really reassuring. Next step is to diagnose what's wrong with the tank. That could be very pricey and time consuming.

What is the point of this story? Construction is the same everywhere: generally, trade people and  architects don't really give a shit about their work. Of course, there are some exceptions: good architects exist, good contractors/trades too. It is just that finding them is like finding a needle in a haystack. We are very lucky we have found an amazing builder who has a team of very skilled workers. Sometimes though, even if they are good, they might still make mistakes that will cost money. Quite frankly, in my sister's situation, it would not have been difficult to plan an access door to the tank, but it was probably too much work thinking about it, too much work building it so the solution was "fuck it, let's do it this way and hope that the tank never fails". Yeah, in an ideal world, it wouldn't have but we live in the REAL WORLD, don't we? So why not plan solutions for the real world? It is not so fucking complicated!!! Now I wish my sister good luck with this, I hope she gets hot water soon because taking a freezing cold shower in November is NOT enjoyable and it was been quite cold over the past few days in Paris.