So it turns out that it’s not a bad idea to wait until AFTER the work is done for payment when hiring a contractor. As long as they already have your money, you’re at their mercy, but if you haven’t paid yet, they get the job done right or they don’t get paid. Ah, if only we could go back in time. It probably would have avoided a lot of unnecessary stress with our whole carpet fiasco.

After doing a little research on carpet buying, we went with a local installer who could get carpet from a nearby mill. Everything went smoothly until the actual installation of the carpet (they seemed nice enough, pricing was competitive, etc.).

My wife had previously explained that we did want a certain area of the home carpeted and it didn’t get carpeted. They then told us that there wasn’t enough carpet left over to cover that area with the carpet we ordered. So we can either get different carpet placed there or we can pay more for carpet we thought we already bought.

Our other grievance was that the carpet layer left trash everywhere. I wouldn’t expect someone to sweep and vacuum and so forth, but there were huge scraps strewn throughout the house. This is in addition to a Jamba Juice cup left on the bathroom which is just unprofessional. The installer also took out some folding closet doors without replacing them. They were left in our bathroom. This would normally be just a nuisance, but when you’re already working under the stress of moving, it became a severe headache. (They told us later that it’s customary for a customer to remove these, but we were given no such instructions, even though my wife specifically asked if there was anything else we needed to do to prep the house).

The main point here is that people pay a lot for carpet labor. I understand that it’s rough work, but I would expect at least a sense of customer care. When my wife called to express our complaints, she was not treated like a valuable customer, but argued with over what was whose fault and so forth. Bad form, Ogden Carpet. Bad form.

So there are some benefits of having friends who can trace their lineage back to their primate ancestors. For example, when it came time to paint some hard-to-reach corners in the entryway of our new house, we had our hands tied. Luckily, Jimmy, our half-human-drum-machine, half-monkey, friend came to the rescue. In the pictures below, you’ll notice he’s got his legs wrapped around some railing about 12 feet off the ground. That’s a pretty hard fall if he slips, FYI. So anyway, Jimmy, we thank you (one thing to note about half-monkey friends is that you should always show gratitude for what they do or they’ll start flinging their own feces at your window at 3 AM . . . we need to find another monkey friend to help clean that one up.)