The Stairway

In a 200+ year-old-building, there are bound to be problems. Often they are "good" problems, such as high ceilings, antiquated, but attractive windows with bubbled pre-WWII glass.

The "bad" things are that there are cracks in the walls, floors that slope and electrical plugs that don't work.

Our building "voted in" an elevator several years ago and it has been installed. It works perfectly. But the stairwell was not renovated at the time the elevator was installed. Photo above shows some of the ugly details of our current stairway.

Now, we have "voted" to renovate the stairwell itself. The work was supposed to start in September 07, but there were problems. I have no ideas what the problems were. But, it took until September 08 for the project to start.

It seemed to start on time. The new, revised schedule, of course.

The first work to be done was the woodwork. They fixed the floor boards that jumped up when you stepped on them. They covered the electrical wires and the gas pipes with boxes. Then all work stopped. I think this was in November.

It is now the end of May and NOTHING has been done since November. We complained at the annual AGM (meeting of the owners of the building) but they claimed that the work was "on track". OK, who am I to determine what that means.

However, my checkbook is closed. Until the work is finished, I will not pay for anything more. No one knows this and no one cares because no one besides us (dumb Americans) pays on time. It's innate, we are not willing to hold the check.

But now on May 25th the work started again. Hopefully it will finish before the first snow but it certainly will not finish before everyone (the workers) go on vacation. So, I think that July 15th is the deadline for completion and I'm not hopeful that it will be done. They've been working for a week. But, it's only two guys. In the US, they would send 10 guys, they would work non-stop and they would finish in a week.