I know that many contractors must be hard-working, honest guys, but seriously...why does it have to be so hard to deal with them? I'm paying good money for them to do work for me, and yet I feel like I have to stand over them to ensure that they're not ripping me off, or doing a shoddy job. To wit:

Our bathroom shower started leaking a couple of weeks, and the most likely culprit seemed to be a cracked shower pan. We got 5 estimates, and went with a contractor who came in around the middle in price, and seemed knowledgeable, friendly, and competent. The problems we have had so far:

1) He told us that it would take no more than a week to replace the shower and put in a new vanity. That's one of the reasons we picked him, because he said he wanted to be speedy, because it was more cost effective for him. It's now been two weeks, all time that I have taken off to be here because I don't want a bunch of strange men wandering through my house. And they're still not done.

2) He had someone on his staff pull the permit. They were supposed to drop it off in our mailbox. They never did. No permit throughout this whole process. We've been assured that the permit has been pulled, and there have been inspections done throughout the whole process, but the fact that we don't actually have the permit posted irks me.

3) I explicitly told him that I wanted the bullnose tile in the shower done a certain way. Because the workers don't speak English, I had to take it on trust that it had been explained to them. Well, it wasn't. When I finally pushed my way into the bathroom to see the tiling in process (it's a very small bathroom, and I couldn't get in there very often without tripping over the workers, and I didn't realize they had started the tiling until well after the fact), I saw it was completely wrong. By then the tile was 2/3rds done, and I have to live with it.

4) The tile workers ran out of bullnose tile, and didn't tell me (not that I could have understood what they were saying if they had). So around the base of the shower they just used regular tile that looked like crap, and I guess expected I wouldn't notice. Even worse, they tried to hand bullnose it themselves by breaking off the edge of the tile! It looked awful, I can't even tell you how bad it was. I complained to the contractor, and he tried to convince me that one side of bullnosed tile always looks worse than the other side. Um...no. I brought the bullnosed tile home myself, I know what it looked like. Don't feed me crap and expect me to like the taste of it. I stomped my feet and made them use an actual bullnosing tool to fix the appearance of the tile, and it ended up looking semi-decent.

5) When we went around to buy all the supplies for the bathroom (vanity, showerhead, sink faucet), I asked the contractor about the shower door. He said, "Don't worry about it, I have a guy who you can talk to, to get your door through." Time passes, the renovation is nearly over, and still no shower door. Finally, he says, "Oh, yeah, you have to go get your shower door now." I'm like, "What??" So we run around, trying to find a shower door in either brushed or satin nickel, only to find out that anything in that finish in our size is at least a two wait week. IF we had ordered it back when we had gotten our other supplies, we'd have it now, but since he didn't tell us to do that -- had in fact, told us NOT to do it, we're going to have to wait. I am SO angry.

There's a ton of other small things, little annoyances that have made this process just a major pain in the butt. I don't understand how something that is costing me thousands of dollars is such a difficult process. My husband and I did most of the earlier remodeling work on our house ourselves, and this experience just confirms for me that it was the right decision. It's hard work, but you can make certain that you do it the way you want it when you do it yourselves.