Actions speak louder than words...

A month ago, our super nice builder told us that it was time to start laying the bricks at the house. He had quotes from 3 different masons:

- the first guy had a stroke so we couldn't hire him

- the second guy only worked on week-ends

- the third guy was at the same price point as the second one and was available.

We told him that we didn't care and that he could pick whoever he wanted, since they all came in at the same price.

So the third guy was hired to do the job. We met briefly with him before he started and he was sort of bragging and saying that he was going to do an amazing job. Okay, great, that's fine with me. I love when someone does an amazing job.... OBVIOUSLY! We don't pay someone to do a shit job.. well, at least, not willingly. 

The bricks we have picked are a little tricky to install. First of all, the weather needs to be warmer, by that I mean not below 0 degrees Celsius. In other words, it is not recommended to lay the bricks when it is freezing. Also, because the mortar needs to dry before you lay more bricks, you can only do about 500 bricks at a time. If you do more than that, it starts to cause problems. It doesn't dry properly, it moves around. It can easily turn into a disaster. At any rate, masons usually charge a bit a lot more when they work with these bricks because of the labour that's involved. This mason was no exception. His crew started on a Wednesday and was working under the tarp where heat was provided, to keep the bricks at a decent temperature. We couldn't really see what was happening because of that big plastic cover that was hiding the entire operation. On the Saturday, we noticed that they were almost done the entire facade and we thought it was going a little too fast so we stepped under the plastic sheet to inspect the work...

                                  O_O

                                   *_*

Bloody Hell!!! Complete fucking disaster!!! As in WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT MESS?

At first, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. It was sort of like looking at a Franck Gehry's building, you know with the wavy facade and the weird angles. I mean, that looks great when it is meant to be that way, there is no question about it. But really, in our case, that's not the style we are going for. As well, the bricks were all sliding down to one side on the house and the corners were all over the place, nothing was straight. Talk about an amazing job... Amazingly shitty, that's for sure. 

At this point, we realized we needed to STOP them from going any further. It looked like they had never done this sort of work before... Total amateurs.

We called our builder who sent one of his brick experts to take a look and the expert said "yeah, this is shit and needs to be taken down and redone". Great, that's just great.

The builder reacted right away. Pretty awesome. He fired the mason and hired the second guy, who is an expert with these bricks and has already started the job. Obviously, he is going very slowly and he seems to know what he is doing. It looks pretty good so far. He was actually the person who took down the bricks and he said that the work was done so badly, he had never seen such thing... wow... he also told us that we would have had to probably redo the whole facade 10 years from now.