Well, Thanksgiving’s done, so that’s good. It’s been a crazy month, as usual, culminating in me learning a bit of wisdom I thought I’d share with all of you:

DON’T HIRE PEOPLE BASED UPON FACEBOOK INFO.

Just don’t. It’s not great.

How do I know this? Well, I just did, and it turned out....well...okay. Not great, but not completely horrible.

We have these Saltillo-looking concrete tiles throughout the house, and they are stained and dirty as all heck. So we’ve been waiting to strip and re-seal them, but the chemicals are too caustic with my asthma for me to do it, it’s too much work for just my husband, and the quotes we got we astronomical when we first moved in here. So we thought it was just a project for the future.

I mean, I’ve scrubbed and scrubbed, but all the crap was sealed in by some idiot before, who didn’t bother to actually clean or strip the floor before putting the sealant on, so yeah. Nothing we can do.

Last week, this guy posted all these pretty pictures of his tile/stone/brick restoration work, so I thought I’d message him to get a quote. He came out and gave us one, and it was pretty reasonable, so I told him we’d get in touch in the spring, as it was still enough money that we needed to save up a bit. Well, he messaged us back and said he didn’t have a job this weekend, and he’d rather work, so he’d give us a substantial discount if we wanted to go ahead and do it now (it ended up being a 25% discount, which is huge). So we said okay.

He originally thought it would take three days, then said two, then said maybe even one.

Yeah, nope. It took all of three and would’ve taken longer had my husband not helped him.

Late. Every. Time. Also, tried to seal up the floor on the first day without waiting for the stripper to work so the entire floor looked like it had a sunburn and was peeling. Also, obviously didn’t understand how stripper works, so my husband had to explain that a grinder wasn’t going to do it; he needed to scrape off the junk. Also, didn’t have a scraper, so he used ours. And my husband had to go point out all the bubbling because the guy was just going to seal it in.

Also, kept needing money to buy more stripper and also pay his rent. Finally had to say no more until he was done.

Yesterday, we were finally finished and he just left after getting the money, leaving equipment in my garage and a sealed floor that does look better in some areas, but definitely looks worse in places. All in all, could’ve skipped it entirely and not spent the money.

Oh, well. I will publicly take the blame for this one.

And now you can all learn this lesson without having to pay for it, the way I just did. Just, don’t do it. Go by word of mouth or the Better Business Bureau, or a friend of your cousin’s or whatever. But not the Facebook. Ugh.