Trust No One

I haven't written in a while because I was still feeling rather grumpy about our electrician incident last week. I think I was finally getting over it until the electrician hit me (not literally, although I am starting to feel like smacking him silly) again last night. Josh worked out with him a simple way to avoid moving us into the litter box. Great. He just needed to come back and do a few things. We needed to do a few things and then we could get the inspection and move on with our lives. Fantastic.

We've been waiting for him to deliver his formal estimate for the upstairs. When he gave us his estimate for the downstairs, he told us that the upstairs would be about the same. He, in fact, told us this repeatedly. Last night, he finally sent us a more formal description of the cost for the upstairs and it is TWICE what the downstairs cost us. As I try to prevent the steam from coming out of the top of my head, the words that keep running through my head are that line from Pretty Woman when Richard Gere is explaining to Julia Roberts about his bad relationship with his father, "I am very angry with him. I am very angry with him." Yes, I know that you're supposed to expect costs to be significantly higher than what you estimate, but I find it infuriating that his costs are now twice what he projected only 4 days ago. So, now we have to either bargain him down or find another electrician mid-stream. Our electrician is a decent electrician, but I now distrust any words that come out of his mouth. Just to show him how angry I am, I did not make him a cup of coffee this morning which I always do. Take that!