SeriouslySeekingtoSave strongly strides straight into slaying her mortgage!

Lois_E

When my friends from work and I go out, we split the bill with adjustments - a bit less for the people who didn't drink alcohol, or didn't have pudding, or had cheap vegetarian meals, and a bit more for the people who had extra drinks or whatever. It seems to work for us.

SeriouslySeekingtoSave

Well it’s been a little difficult to get my head fully into the repayment zone this month.

On the negative side I’m still spending too much money on food and I’m not cooking as much as I should be. I’ve had several takeaways and my new vice is buying packets of prawn crackers from Lidl and scoffing the lot in one sitting… I am still going to the gym every day and working quite hard so it’s not impacting on my waistline yet I don’t think.

I’m trying to identify the causes for my derailing over the whole food thing and I’m fairly sure that it’s just stress over the mess in the house. The appalling job my ‘friend’ left me with when he beggared off on holiday had me fuming and then I discovered a newly painted wall that was flaking and cracking a week after being painted and I was told ‘oh it was fine when I left it’. That obviously means that it’s acceptable to have a paint job only last a week. When he came back from holiday and I started listing all of the reasons that the internet gave for cracking paint (cos it would be too much to expect him to have any clue) he finally clicked when I said ‘painting over paint that’s not dry’. Apparently the guy he hired did that on that wall. What a freaking idiot! So the wall had to be sanded down again and he didn’t do a proper job, which I told him and was told ‘oh it will be fine’ so it cracked again. Two more pots of paint needed (grgh!). I’ve been too heartsick to check again to see if it’s held as regardless I’m not getting him back. If it goes again I’m going to claim through the small claims court, get money back for both that and the shocking job he did everywhere else and get a professional in to fix it. I no longer care about the friendship – that’s gone, and aren’t I a poster child for the adage ‘Never hire a friend to do any work for you’. Never, Ever, Again!

So, along with all the fixing of his crappy work (I’ve constantly been up on a ladder retouching the coving and the splashed paint all over the walls, as well as sanding back around the skirting boards because the gloss paint has literally gone ‘everywhere’ – I have to upload some of the photo’s) I’ve been trying to sort out the other things that need doing such as getting my hemp into the cracks between the floorboards (wow, that takes forever) and getting curtains for the flat (another nightmare due to how the bay window in my bedroom is just a PIA with how it is positioned). So it’s been pretty much all go.

[Warning – slight Geek alert ahead… J]

Right in the middle of this my laptop decided to stop working (which is why my posting has been sparse) and that really threw a spanner in the works as it’s a hard slog trying to organise my life purely using my iphone. I’ve bought a new one and that should be arriving around about the 25th of this month. I came in to work and spent a lot of time researching on my work computer. Over the course of a couple of days I started at the top of the range (around £1400) so I could see what those spec’s were like and then worked my way down to the more reasonably priced £500 and below. I like my games so I focused my search on good laptops for games, which isn’t a bad idea as games are usually the most demanding things you can run on any computer (unless possibly you are a graphic designer or some such thing) so if it runs games well it can really do fairly much anything else. I nearly bought an ASUS (which has a very good and well deserved reputation for giving good bang for your buck) which was ranging in price from £500 to £350 (which just shows how shopping around is definitely the way to go!) but was put off because the OS was Vista and I quite frankly this that Vista is a p.o.s! I suffered with it for 3 years on my last laptop so I really wasn’t keen to do it to myself twice. I sent an email request asking if it was possible to change os’s but continued shopping in the meantime ran across a forum thread from two months ago where a user with the same budget as myself was looking for the same type of laptop (a gaming one). There was a lot of useful discussion there and the choice eventually narrowed down to the Asus that I was looking at and a Dell one which I hadn’t been. There was a lot more in depth chat on the relative merits of the two machines and the vote was for the Dell due to (feel free to blank this out) the duo core on the Asus bottlenecking even with the dedicated graphics card and the Dell having the newer chipset and motherboard. It also had Window 7 which was a definite plus in my eyes.

The Dell was slightly more expensive at £400 (on the cheap site – others were £500) but even more of a downside was the fact that the top was a lovely pink! The model came in other colours but they had sold and they only had a large amount of the pink ones left (can’t think why…). In the end I decided to suck it up – I mean you don’t even notice the laptop top when you are working on it. However as I pointed this out to my work colleagues one of them suggested that I try the Dell outlet store and that he had bought from there twice and gotten amazing bargains, it just depended on what they had in stock. So I checked and found that not only did they have my laptop there (reconditioned model) for £100 cheaper but it was in Tomato Red and perfectly matched my room d!cor! Genius! Even with the £20 delivery charge it’s still £80 less and I’m really looking forward to that baby arriving.

I’ve got more info on the curtain search and my hunt for a bargain there (not likely, I’m a lot more comfortable around pc’s than curtains) but this post is already a monster so I’ll get back a bit later.

Sepa74

lol.... love it! You make three geekettes on the forum, you, me and hurdler, although I think you both outclass me

Us girls gotta stick together.

Peonie

No wonder you are stressed and eating rubbish.

shala_moo

Hi SStS,

Just reading your diary and i feel your pain with the decorating.. we asked my brother in law to do some work in our kitchen.. boy do i wish i'd have just paid some one proper to do it! He charged us about the same as a normal kitchen fitter would and at the time i trusted him to do a good job.. granted i'm a bit of a perfectionist but it wasn't good.. i just had to grin and bear it, but it won't be a mistake i'm making again.

I hope you get your issues resolved, although it doesn't help with your stress levels!

Just think of the beautiful home you'll have soon, and hold on to that thought.. x

SeriouslySeekingtoSave

Sepa74 wrote: »

lol.... love it! You make three geekettes on the forum, you, me and hurdler, although I think you both outclass me

Us girls gotta stick together.

I know, we have a lot in common I think. I must confess that I am a bit of a pretend geek though - I like technology to be useful and practical (and yes, I include playing games as useful!) but technology for technologies sake doesn't interest me that much.

As the days get cold and dark though I spend more time chopping up baddies on my various games. In good Spring and Autumn weather and during summer I'm outside.

SeriouslySeekingtoSave

Peonie wrote: »

No wonder you are stressed and eating rubbish.

I know! I looked at my face this morning and I've got red flaky skin all over, especially up the side by my hairline. That only happens when I get stressed over a long period of time...

SeriouslySeekingtoSave

shala_moo wrote: »

Hi SStS,

Just reading your diary and i feel your pain with the decorating.. we asked my brother in law to do some work in our kitchen.. boy do i wish i'd have just paid some one proper to do it! He charged us about the same as a normal kitchen fitter would and at the time i trusted him to do a good job.. granted i'm a bit of a perfectionist but it wasn't good.. i just had to grin and bear it, but it won't be a mistake i'm making again.

I hope you get your issues resolved, although it doesn't help with your stress levels!

Just think of the beautiful home you'll have soon, and hold on to that thought.. x

Shala moo I'm fairly sure I remember reading in your diary a little while ago (sorry, internet access is restricted atm) and reading about a photo you had pinned to your wall and you were dreaming away. That was the last I heard and I thought it was nice (especially considering my daydreams of a beautifully done house were turning into nightmares) but it sounds like you have also been derailed? Trusting other people to do a good job shouldn't surely be too much of an ask?

My arguements are still ongoing and I've added another couple of stresses to the pot as well. I'd love to let it all out in the forum, but it's another monster of a post and I don't have internet access for long enough right now, or the time to type it up off line. I will try for a proper update tonight as well as a catchup on all of the other diaries.

SeriouslySeekingtoSave

Well so much for good intentions however I'm at work right now and rather than put in some productive work into the mountain of calls I need to catch up on I thought I'd update my diary instead...

Soooo, after constant agravation from my now very ex friend, I have concluded that I am only going to get any sort of satisfaction from him if I am prepared to take him to the small claims court.

Accordingly I have spent the past week going through the details of what was meant to be done as per the list of work which went with the accepted quote and working out about a third of it hasn't been done.

I have also been through all of the rooms in the house and photographed the appalling work that I have been left with and this is after he came back from his two week holiday and supposedly took a week to 'fix' the problems. I took a day off work (!) to show him all of the problems around the flat as I truely don't know if his eyesight, and (more importantly) his dedication to finding the faults would have enabled him to see where they all were. I actually told him that if he managed to find even half of the faults without me showing him where they were then I'd feel more confident that he was going to be able to sort everything out. I ended up showing him the areas and got a 'yeah yeah yeah' response to my question of 'so can you see these, can you fix these'? which is exactly the sort of answer he's been giving me all these weeks - no apology at all for his horrendeous work.

The worst place was a wall which had cracks all over it a week after being painted! At first I thought it was because he painted over a freshly plastered wall (which the internet says is a big no no) but after he insisted that it was filler and it was fine to paint straight over. So I did investigation to find out possible reasons, because in my eyes if you don't know what went wrong you don't know how to fix it. After running through some of the reasons it turned out that the wall had been painted over with the second coat of paint before it had dried and it looked like the Navada Desert as one of my friends described it after seeing the photo's - dry cracks running through everything. That had to be sanded down and redone three times (because he didn't do it properly the first time - I said that according to the onine feedback it needed to be sanded right back, a pva wash put on the wall and then repainted, I was ignored again and it cracked again the same day).

Anyway that all took a lot of time (and extra paint which I am supposed to pay for) so fairly much nothing else got done. The coving in the main room was done but it was like dealing with a five year old. I pointed out the overrun from the wall paint onto my pristine white coving (because the :mad: idiot hadn't masked it off while he was painting the wall) and said 'you need to mask off the wall and repaint the white). He started off just painting and off course was getting paint on the main wall. I pointed it out and said he needed to mask off as I said, he wiped it off with his finger (which didn't work as I still have white paint all over my wall) and kept on going. Then I saw that because he was being more careful to not get white paint on my wall he wasn't actually fixing the overrun from the wall onto the coving. In the end I grabbed the masking tape, went up the ladder and put a strip along the wall of the part he had just fixed and pointed my finger at it and demanded that he actually look and see that it wasn't fixed. He FINALLY said 'oh yeah, you can see it can't you?'. OMG!!! As I said, it was like trying to get through to a five year old - he just kept on totally ignoring me and I had to basically throw a total strop to get him to do the most basic of fix jobs. Exhausting - I so didn't need all of that rubbish. He's meant to be an adult for :mad: sake!

Needless to say as soon as I wasn't there the work turned to crap again, the fixes that should have been weren't. I mean one of his bright ideas for fixing the paint job in the kitchen (where he didn't cut around the edges until the paint was dry on the main wall and so left dark tide marks all around the edges as paint applied with a brush tends to be thicker than paint from a roller) was, drum role please. He actually had the :mad: idocity to say that he was just going to paint the inside of the walls because the edges were clearly darker and he just needed to do the middle. :eek::eek: Seriously. What can you even say to something like that???

After I had to go back to work I was frankly terrified as to what he was going to get up to without me standing over him. As it turned out I needed have bothered as he basically just didn't bother turning up at all. All throughout the 'renovations' he had the most terrible attendance - late starts (getting back at 4 to find he'd painted on line of a skirting board and started on a door for instance) and simply not showing up at all. In this case though he only had a week to fix all of the problems and there were a LOT of them! So queue a steady stream of txts from me asking him to let me know when he arrived all of them totally ignored until I got a short one at 2 in the afternoon saying that he 'was busy painting'. After this I just basically decided the stress wasn't worth it anymore. I was just getting treated with such total disrespect and eventually the relationship deteriorated to the extent that I no longer felt that I would be taking a friend to court. I would be taking someone who needed to be taught a lesson in respect for people!

That's a very small part of all of the troubles I've had with my 'friend'. Lesson well and truly learnt guys... Of course he still doesn't seem to be taking me seriously and probably won't until he get the court notification sent to him.

Sepa74

OMG! It sounds awful. I hope the small claims court establishes a remedy for you.

I don't game at all, actually. I have occasionally, and I'll play a game for a couple of weeks or month, but then the passion wears out and I do something else. I don't even have an Xbox or a Wii!

But like you, I'm outside in spring and summer, usually pottering around in my garden.