Construction Issues Revisited

I never finished the sad story about our home construction. Trying once more to make a long story short, just when we were about to loose all hope, the construction company kicked into gear and things started to move so fast we couldn't keep up.

After a short period of relief I started to get really, really stressed when I saw the subcontractor for the concrete construction: The guy was soo fat all he could do was to sit on an old leather couch (!) his workers had placed into what would one day become our living room. From there he directed his crew with occasional shouts like "Don't put so much steel into the ceiling, stupid!", or "Measure? Why measure? I can see from here that this is the right angle!", or "Concrete is made from sand! Understand? Mostly from sand!" These are free translations from Arabic, which I don't understand at all, I confess. But even if he didn't actually say it this way, the effect his encouragement had on his teenage workers can not be denied. Not a single wall without a belly, not a single 90 degrees angle in the whole house. The representative of the construction company, who obviously had developed a liking of me, saw me standing in the middle of the concrete cave almost in tears and muttered the following notable words: "Never mind, it looks a bit strange now, but once you have some paint and pictures on the walls you will just forget about all those angles." I felt like drinking his blood then, but you know what? The guy was right. Four months after living in my first partly-self-owned house I almost started to like it.

Almost, until I went on vacation to Germany and came to visit the new house of my old buddy Andreas. Same kind of house, same kind of neighborhood (okay, four times as expensive, but everything is relative, right?), and not a single defect to be found under the whole damn roof! I looked for the better part of a day, accidentally sneeking into every corner ("What? Ahh, nothing, just lost a coin here somewhere..."), even krept under the stairs ("Gee, that coin must have rolled all the way in here!") and couldn't find one thing that had gone wrong. Just when I got ready to throw myself out of the bed room window ("How do you open these windows???"), I found a piece of rubber on the shutters that had softened a bit in the August sun and left a black mark on the white window seal. Ha! Gotcha! ("Ahh, did YOU see THIS?") Man, they screwed you too, didn't they? Yeap, this is how it goes, people. Everywhere! Forget about building your dream house! Ha! Haha! Haaarrrrrggghhh!