Oh my god, I could have screamed.... in pure relief!
Despite the general consensus from this thread being that I shouldn’t accept the work completed so far, I was still very nervous about how yesterday would turn out. But to my relief they sent a respectable plasterer this time and it was an entirely different experience.
He was appalled by the job the previous plasterer had done and said it was borderline easier and faster to pull the whole lot down and start again rather than try to ‘fix’ it. But we discussed each issue pragmatically and agreed which areas would be removed and replaced, which would remain, and which would be reworked/modified. He also educated me on the general use of expanding foam in plaster-boarding, what size of gap is generally acceptable to fill and what isn’t (i.e the 50mm gaps the previous guy was filling was lazy, unskilled, and unacceptable). Then as advised by someone in this thread, and me feeling able to do so because the new plasterer wasn’t full of s**t like the last one, I just left him to get on with it, only popping in a few times throughout the day to take him a coffee.
By the time he left yesterday he achieved more by himself in 8 hours, and of infinitely better quality, than the previous plasterer did in two days with the help of two additional people. He’s just arrived this morning to start the wet plaster, I can’t wait to see how the next stage turns out. Keeping my fingers crossed
Some of you may think I’m obsessing but this has been so important to me because I’m now 37 weeks pregnant with our first child so I just want to get this finished to the right standard so we have a usable space for when he arrives. I’ve never asked for more than was promised to me when I signed the contract and with the next year being booked up with learning how to be a parent I simply won’t have the capacity to manage any remedial work.
You’ve really helped me this last week with your advice and I can’t thank you enough. Times are strange at the moment with Covid-19, you seem to have a great brotherhood (siblinghood?) here, so keep supporting each other, in times like these support networks can be the most important of things.
I sense Tapit has some things going on in his/her life and would probably benefit from a cyber hug or two, so keep sharing the love.
I’ll share some photos of the completed boarding a bit later.