Fuming

I am so mad I can't see straight.

That F#@$%@#$ing hot tub is doing the SAME DAMN THING that it did *before* we dropped (are you sitting down?) $850 to get it all fixed up and ready to go this year, two weeks ago. That's right, $850!!!!!! which was *WAY* more than he had led me to believe it was going to cost. He acted all surprised that it had come to that, but guess what? The difference was the $330 in labor he charged me! ARGH! He was only here, over two visits, for MAYBE three hours. Even with travel time, which I don't think I should have to pay for, that would still be almost $100 an hour! PLUS, I found out that he marks things up 100%!!! I found the same filters we use, and bought from him, for literally half the price online. I know people need to mark things up, but ?DOUBLE?! Saturday was when I realized the thing was busted again (the error message was the same, and the heat pump, which is what we just replaced, was burning hot again, just like last time, when I took the front panel off), the temp was down to 68, meaning it's probably been down for about a week. Had we known that it was going to cost that much, we probably never would have fixed it in the first place, since that's most of the way to a pool membership at the hoity-toity pool place here in town. SO, I drained the thing, washed the filters, suctioned out the pump area with a wet vac just in case one of the kids' toys somehow got in there (which is essentially impossible), and refilled it, just in case that was the problem. NOPE. So, we now have a sparkling clean, beautiful piece of shit sitting on the side of the house.

I called the guy and left a message saying that after two weeks, it's doing the exact same thing, and for $850 I expected better. I said that I want him to come out here and fix it, and if it's not right this time, we're getting rid of the tub (the implication being that he will lose our business, which after he fixes it this time, he will have anyway, but I'm not telling him that until it's working again). He'd better not be expecting to charge me, either, because I'm not paying him one. red. cent. Oooooh, that burns me UP!

My only other thought is that it might be the wiring, which there is no way to repair, since the previous owner wired it and then built the deck ON TOP OF THE WIRING so you can't get to it. Oooh, I hate that guy!!! Come to think of it, that's probably what it is, or at least what the repair guy is going to say it is. Although the electrician said that the ampage was adequate.... we're probably going to end up getting rid of the thing in the end, which makes me even MORE furious, since we've sunk all that money into it for NOTHING!

Which leads us into my other weekend story of messed-upedness. When I went to rip up the rest of the carpet in the attic on Saturday, guess what? Mr. Previous Owner glued and screwed subflooring OVER THE HARDWOOD FLOORS UP THERE. There is no way to get it off without destroying the floor underneath. Now, I can't swear that the floor underneath is perfect, but my feeling, based on how badly he screwed up his other projects around here by cutting corners (outdoor outlets missing GFCs, crappily wired hot tubs, etc), is that he was just being lazy somehow and didn't want to repair a board or two before laying carpet. So, now that's what we're going to have to do, too - replace the w/w up there rather than removing it entirely. :( At least I'll get to put new carpeting up there, I suppose, and it *is* a little fun to pick out carpeting.

So, instead of that, I went through the whole room and got rid of stuff no one used anymore, put other stuff, like the small multipurpose fooseball/airhockey/pool table in storage up there, and rearranged the whole place so it works a lot better, and isn't crowded anymore. I also installed a new air conditioner up there, since the old one wasn't working well enough to fill the large space.

The a/c instructions gave me the best laugh of the whole day. They were obviously packed in China or somewhere, because the lable on the plastic wrapper covering the instruction packet, I kid you not, said,

"assy instructions"

HA!!!!!!!!!!!