The other week-end, we went to buy the tiles for 1200+ square feet of porch. One of the guys sitting in the flooring showroom said he would be able to do the installation. So we made an appointment for him to come the next day (Sunday) to check out the job and give us an estimate.

He really showed up at around 10am on Sunday morning. He measured the job and wrote up an estimate. We needed to do some preparation before we could have him start, so we asked him if he could come Labor Day week. He said that he could, and he also said he recognized the truck  in our neighbor’s yard, knew his name, and used to work with him on a construction crew.

So after he left, we checked with the neighbor and eventually found out that he does good work. He’s from Haiti and his accent is pretty thick, so there have been a few communication difficulties. We’re used to the regular West Indian accent without the French, so maybe I can try to use some of my long forgotten second language from my childhood.

Another guy we talked to about building shutters recommended a stateside guy for the tile job. The stateside guy came over and didn’t measure anything. He wrote a number down from our receipt from the flooring company, multiplied it by 3, added some for the steps and gave me a number. His number was about 30% higher than the Haitian’s. I was not impressed by his lazy attitude toward measuring and we’ve had a couple of less-than stellar experiences with supposedly able stateside construction workers who give you a good line, but get distracted by other jobs they’re working on at the same time, or they keep jacking the figures up as the job progresses. I like confidence but not cockiness, and the stateside guy’s attitude left a lot to be desired.

We figured the guy from Haiti would need the money more, he’d be more familiar with Caribbean construction (another thing about statesiders is they base a lot on what works where they come from. And as we well know, stuff down here does not always work that way), and he wouldn’t be resentful about having to work for a living.

He and his helper arrived at around 7:30am, just as he said they would. They got right to work scraping paint off the back porch and Michael helped the boss man moving the thinset and grout and tiles while his helper went to see about immigration paperwork.

The truck that delivered the materials couldn’t fit into the yard close enough to the car port, so there was a lot of heavy lifting to get the stuff in bags undercover. After everything was delivered he started right away on the east porch. Both he and his helper are neat and polite and after I asked them to keep me informed, the communication has been flowing more smoothly.

So far the job is progressing well.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 13th, 2009 at 10:10 am and is filed under St. Croix, Terry Talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.