Well, I tell you, I never thought that I was ever the sort of person who could be pushed to absolute and total wits end. I never thought I could be the one to drop off the edge brandishing a crowbar on foreign soil and waving it around over my head like a crazy person!! Oh, dont judge too quickly. Not until you yourself buy house in France and try to do it up!
Im not crazy; Im quite normal and probably not all that dissimilar to you. But enough was enough and I wanted those lazy, incompetent and far too expensive moron workers off of my property before they completely wrecked it. You know, paying an extra 75% in tax to a French tradesman is one thing (I did it reluctantly), but I do then rather expect that youre going to be VERY, VERY good at your job in that case. I mean, provide some real value for money here Im paying for it.
Do you know that I had to have my brand-new complete kitchen fitted/corrected not twice but three times! The first time they forgot to put some of the waste pipes and services in. The second time, the ones they did forget and now fitted leaked all over the floor.
Do you know that the bathroom I had installed wasnt the one I ordered? Maybe I wouldnt have noticed save for the fact that it was also a completely different colour! The suite would have matched perfectly if only I was colour blind or tripping wildly on hallucinogenics. Neither of these scenarios is applicable to me.
Do you know that I paid over 10,000 Euros to have the exterior of the property re-rendered in the same, utterly awful finish as to what was on there in the first place? The very reason that I instructed the workers to take off the old render was because the finish was uneven and abysmally textured. I didnt like it. The look I wanted was uniformly flat and smooth. They removed it and gave me in its place the exact same thing! Instead of original awful I got renewed awful.
So, yes, at the end of my tether those lazy, over-paid, incompetent fools were abruptly chased out of my property and bon dbarras! to them all.
I do want to pay my greatest of respects to two companies that came to my aid, all the way from England. One was Pudelko Construction, who handled all of my internal works; and the other specialist firm was DuraRend, who handled my exterior rendering. I so wish Id thought of hiring firms like this before but I simply assumed that no one would want to travel all the way to France. But these guys do right down to South France, near the Spanish border!
My advice to anyone with a property in France: Bring your workforce with you!
Links:
htt://www.durarend.co.uk/