what a surprise

Yesterday I called Don about halfway through the day to check in and see whether the HVAC guy had shown up as promised. You can probably guess the answer. No guy, and Don was positively livid. He told me he'd called both Installation Guy and Mr. Sales and Service (who is actually the owner of the company and Installation Guy's boss) and left really nasty messages for both of them. He said if he didn't hear back from either of them by the end of the day, he planned on calling the bank and stopping the check we'd written them (for half the total cost).

Well, before long Mr. Sales and Service called Don back and apologized profusely. He said he had similar calls from three other customers besides us! Apparently, while Mr. S&S was on vacation, Installation Guy -- who normally doesn't do his own scheduling -- had overbooked himself, gotten extremely flustered as a result, and then just stopped communicating with everyone. (!) Apparently he doesn't deal well with pressure. So Mr. S&S told Don that he was taking over the scheduling, with an iron fist or something, and Installation Guy could be out at our place on Thursday, or we could have our check back. Since getting our check back does nothing to get us air conditioning, we said Thursday was fine. If he doesn't show up then, we'll get the check back and find somebody else.

The positive side of this -- because I always find something to be positive about or I'd probably kill myself and others -- is that it frees our timetable up a little for moving downstairs. We were originally going to wait until Installation Guy was done, so that our stuff wouldn't be in his way and we'd have A/C when we moved down there. Now we're just going to go ahead and proceed with the move, and just shove our window units in the downstairs windows for the nonce.

Don got a phenomenal amount of work done yesterday, clearing and packing and organizing and sorting all the stuff upstairs. When I got home from work we went up to Summer and Matt's house and picked up some bags of packing materials (bubble wrap and styrofoam peanuts) that they had from their wedding crystal packaging (thanks guys!). Don will use it today or tomorrow to pack up all of his grandmother's glassware -- we've had it sitting around ever since we found it in the dining room ceiling. He's going to get rid of the last remnants of construction debris on the first floor and then tarp off the rooms we're going to be living in (as opposed to the rooms which will be used simply for construction purposes).

I hope we can get everything done in time for demo day. Even after we finish moving downstairs and packing up our non-necessary stuff, we still have to clear out the attic (a huge task on its own), build the dumpster chute to use on Saturday, and create a temporary landing extension for the staircase so that we can reach the landing window to toss stuff out of and also reach all the walls in the stairwell. Don is optimistic; I am worried.