Will Anything Ever Go Right?

The Wife and I popped up to the house again yesterday to measure the areas around the windows so that we could start looking for curtains. But as is the way, all that went to shit.

While were there a man introduces himself to us as ‘Jamie the flooring guy’ and tells us “I was going to give you a call this afternoon”. Now a statement like this never fills me with confidence and with all the crap that we’ve had to deal with previously it could only mean bad news. And it did!

Despite having chosen the flooring for the house back in July, the construction company had only told Jamie what to get at the beginning of the week and when he tried to order our Cambridge Oak TLC flooring he was told that they were out of stock and wouldn’t be able to get any until December. At the earliest.

We had chosen the flooring as the first of the interior decorations and then planned everything around it including doors, kitchen units and worktops and carpets so that everything went together. We were now told that we would have to choose a different flooring by the end of the day.

We looked at the 11 options we had to choose from and promptly disregarded all of them. None of them would go with everything. They were either too dark, too light, too orange, too cheap looking or just plain wrong. It was only the Cambridge Oak that would go with everything. As we had originally planned.

There was no way that we could make this kind of decision in a couple of hours and so we told him that we would need to take away the huge 6 inch square samples home in order to compare them to all of the pieces of furniture that would be put in the rooms where the flooring was to be laid.

For hours we stared at them. Or should that be “four hours we stared at them”. It was probably longer! We even got The Wife’s sister over to lend us her opinion. In the end we narrowed it down to two different ones, neither of which we were 100% keen on but they were the lesser of eleven evils!

We went back up to the house again today and compared the two options in the house against the doors, kitchen units and worktop and still couldn’t decide which one to go for. When something’s not quite right it’s hard to choose it.

In the end we went with Rustic Birch, as we figure it went with everything except for the doors and it’s easier and cheaper to change doors than it is a whole kitchen! I’m still surprised we went with it as we have mainly oak in the house and we’re still not sure that we’ve done the right thing but we won’t know until it’s all laid down and even now it’s too late.

Oh, I nearly forgot. The construction company also made a fuck up telling Jamie that we were to have carpet downstairs in the study, despite us telling them back in August that we had changed our minds and wanted the same flooring throughout the whole downstairs. Despite them confirming this change in a replied email and despite them sending through an updated finishing schedule which they then forgot to send through to everyone.

So Jamie is now left with some unused carpet that he’s had to pay for and now can’t use.

And we never did get round to measuring the windows for curtains!