Getting Hammered ©

Bang Bang Bang that’s how I start the morning every day and I don’t mean the banging that goes on in the bedroom kind of banging, I mean the banging that comes from a co2 powered nailer.
Every morning I am woken up by the rat-tat tat tat of the nailing gun for the last month now as the neighbours are rebuilding their porch.

The two neighbours that own the duplex next door had to rebuild it because it was starting to lean so far forward that they had to run out the door ever time they left the house and hope this wasn’t the day it was going to fall down and kill them.

So both neighbours got together and decided they had to fix the problem and called in a contractor and soon found out how much it costs to have a porch with a balcony.
Thirty two thousand dollars
Fuck that, that’s a lot of money.
I know things have gotten more expensive but holy crap that’s half the price of a whole house in some places.

Having no choice they hired one of the best contractors around here to do the work.
In fact he didn’t want to do the job because it was such a small job, he usually does high-end work but his wife is friends with one of the neighbours and well, his wife said he is doing it HA HA HA.

OH let me tell you a bit about my neighbours first.
One of them I have known for about thirty-five years, from when I was a kid, I used to play hockey with her brother.
I watched her grow from a teen to a woman, mother and now grandmother.
I watched her son grow from nothing to a 6 foot 6 tree and just became a father himself with a little sprout.
So I have known her and her family for a long time.
She tells me the other day her friend’s husband (the contractor) uses her house as his office while he is working on her porch.
She walked down the other day from bed, in her robe looking like she lost the battle needing a coffee really bad and there are four men in her run down kitchen wearing $5000 suits talking about building million dollar houses drinking coffee from Tim Horton’s and there is one waiting for her and donuts.
She just thanks them and walks out to stare at her porch.

The other neighbour I have known for about ten years and they are weird with a dash of crazy, sprinkled with some eccentricity and marinated in booze.
The guy is ok as far as I am concerned.
It’s his wife, man.

When she is walking towards you, you never know what demon you are about to face.
Will it be the flirtatious wench, the children’s activist or will it be the bitch from hell that floats out the front door of the house with bulging eyes hurling insults at everyone with in earshot then calls the police because she heard a mosquito fart and it woke her up.
No one is safe from her wrath; she belittles her husband infront of people with total disregard if he is near by to hear.

Last year they had this HUGE party across the street.
There had to be 1000 kids in their teens have a great time but it was a little noisy.
As soon as their permit expired they started to break up and go home.
That’s when the neighbours decided to go out there and start screaming at them because they had been too noisy.
Some people should just shut up some times.
Ten cruisers had to show up to put down the riot, no one was arrested but they smashed her windows on her car.

She called the cops on my parents one night because they were trying to close the door and it woke her up.
You never know what you are going to get with this woman like the contractor found out the other day when she came out foaming at the mouth and came down on him like a ton of bricks because she can’t park her car in the garage anymore because he has all the wood in her driveway.

He was fixing her house and she wanted him to do what, bring the lumber he was going to be using everyday like a lunch.
It got so loud we all went out side to see what the ruckus was all about.
I got to give it to the contractor, he gave it back almost as good as he got but she had the Linda Blair thing happening and was pushing him back.

That was it for that days work, he had to move all the lumber from her place and move it to the other neighbour’s side so she could park her car in the garage.
The guy was steaming mad, up to this point they had poured a foundation in and had built the first floor.
When my friend came home from work she found her friend there with her husband and she was telling him to relax but even she wasn’t going to get him to change his mind this time.
He decided that he wasn’t going to finish the job.

My friend asked him what the problem was and she got the whole story of what had happened.
She asked him not to mind her neighbour and to finish the job, she had a lot invested into it so far and no contractor wants to finish someone else’s work.
He thought about it for a while and then told her that he would fix only her side and not the crazy one’s side and went home.

She was telling us this after he had gone.
Both houses are attached and the porches and balconies were one with a partition in the middle.
What he is going to do is only build half of it and leave the other side without the balcony part and give her back ten grand.
My friend was flipping about that and was hoping that cooler heads would prevail the next day.

The next couple of days were tense but funny to.
He was only building one side like he said he would.
It’s like buying the front end of a car without the back part it looks funny.
These two houses are part of a set of row houses and you can’t build it different from the others and now there will be one without a balcony.

Every day the nut next door would come home in her car with her hat pulled down and dark sunglasses on trying no to be seen.
About the third day after the fight, her husband came and talked to the contractor then apologized for his wife’s behaviour and asked if he could finish the job.
The contractor agreed but told him that he had to put up scaffolding in his laneway so they could build the balconies and they agreed to that.

Like I said the husband is a nice guy but his wife……
They have two kids to and a dog.
The dog does his business in their yard all winter and no one picks in up.
You know, its frozen now so grab it but no, they don’t but they do leave it out there to thaw in the spring and mingle with the four months of fucken piss that just thawed along with it.
Last year we had to call the city in to deal with it because we had to keep our windows closed it smelled so bad.

They have two cute little girls.
You know, I never knew she was pregnant, none of us did.
She is a husky woman with broad shoulders and walks like a wrestler stomping down the street.
She was nine months pregnant and she looked exactly the same as if she wasn’t.
THEN she has another one right after.
If the kids didn’t look alike and a lot like her I would have said she adopted them because there was no way she was pregnant.

They don’t clean.
I have heard it from a dozens of people who have been in their house.
They don’t clean.
She will hire cleaners to come in every three months or so but they won’t pick up after themselves.

My SIL’s daughter watched her kids one summer and she had to walk around their dirty underwear scattered in piles all over the floor, empty fast food containers on every piece of furniture in the house that had been there for months.
I guess everyone has the right to live the way they wish but come on you got kids running around.

I have to say though that the work next door looks better than first rate, two or three people a day stop and ask for his number to get their porches don to but he tells them no, this is just for a friend.
While the construction has been going on next door a relationship has grown between my father and the contractor.
The old man has been out there watching every day and putting in his two cents whenever he comes up with something.
They had been getting to know each other for the last month now and my father brings them out food, he gives him wood,
The other day my father gave him one of his prized tomatoes, it was about a pound and a half and the guy was so happy he gave the old man all the unused plywood to make some fold away tables and is fixing one of the columns on the porch for free.

The other day he took my father and they took off to look at some of his cars and businesses he owned.
He has 13 cars and trucks for his personal use.
The other day my father had a bbq for them and fed them all, everything was going great for this blossoming relationship until one day my father made a mistake and asked the question he should have never asked.

In every relationship there is one question that will make it stronger or shatter it into a forty-four thousand pieces.

“How much to fix new porch mine”, asked my father?
Forty-four thousand dollars, replied the contractor
“Are you crazy”, said my father?

Have a nice day

Walker