OK, everyone, play nice

I am in the middle of renovating my new apartment. For some reason, I thought that buying a "fixer upper" would be better because then I would be able to renovate it the way I wanted. Things seemed to be going well. I hired a contractor recommended by the Sponsor from whom I purchased my apartment. I was told that he was really good, had worked on several apartments in the building, was very attentive to details, and worked very clean. His name is Pedro.

Pedro gave me a quote for the work I wanted to have done: upgrading the wiring, sanding all the floors, skim coating all the walls and ceilings, removing the old linoleum tile on the kitchen walls, and painting all the rooms. His initial quote was quite high. I was able to bargain him down almost halfway -- I found that not returning his calls was quite effective. When I did pick up the phone, he would inevitably lower his price. I thought I had quite the bargain, until he finally sent me the description of work to be done -- it left out the electrical work. He was asking for an additional $5,000 to have a licensed electrician do the work or $2,000 for a non-licensed electrician. Poor wiring and the threat of an electrical fire really freaks me out, so I knew that I wanted to have the work done by someone who was licensed. However, $5,000 was a little high for my budget, so I found my own licensed electrician who would do the work for less. That's when the trouble started and it became Pedro vs. Pedro.

Pedro the contractor is from Mexico. Pedro the electrician is from the Dominican Republic. I was naive enough to think "Hey, they're both Latino, they'll get along." According to my contractor, Dominicans are sloppy, lazy, and can't be trusted. According to my electrician, Mexicans don't know what they are talking about.

The reason for the controversy? In order to upgrade the wiring, the electrician had to open up the walls in certain places in order to run the new power lines and also had to remove the old fixtures and receptacles so that he could upgrade them. My contractor thought that the electrician and his workers were trying to rush the job and were making the holes bigger than they needed to be. I had no idea who was right. All I know is that I had to wake up extra early last Tuesday so that I could mediate. The contractor was the first to arrive, then me, then the electrician (maybe Dominicans are tardy as well as lazy?). Without going into details, the conversation became quite heated and after the electrician asked the contractor if he was a licensed electrician (he's not, but he was an electrician in Mexico for 10 years) I had to physically separate them. I had the electrician go into the kitchen while I talked to the contractor in the living room. I felt like a preschool teacher telling one of her kids to go take a "time out." In the end, I had to pay an extra $600 in order to fix the holes.

I also had to decide on who would do the work on patching the holes -- I decided to go with my contractor since he was doing all the other plaster work already. When I called him later that afternoon to let him know, he was still upset. And he was slurring his speech. When I first met my contractor, he told me that he couldn't call me on Wednesday nights because he had to go to AA meetings. I think that the incident with the electrician caused my contractor fall off the wagon. This has been the general tone for the work the renovations. The only thing that keeps me going is the idealized image of the end product.