I'm finally moving to my new apartment at the weekend. As a recap, this is the apartment that I bought in 2004, received ownership in 2006 and have been fitting it out, slowly, since October last year. Yes, it's all the same apartment.
We've been through a number of tribulations.
1) The gas fitter would only connect up two parts of the three part hob, saying it would be dangerous. The kitchen company came back and connected up all three parts but now the top drawer underneath won't open.
2) The bath was beautifully installed and tiled round, but it was back-to-front so it all had to be ripped out again.
3) The installers were told to leave sufficient space to grout round the ceramic floor tiles (not standard Chinese practice). They were shown what to do and they wrote it into the contract. On visiting the apartment after the installation I was told 'You don't grout round floor tiles, so we did it like this'. Up they came and were put down properly.
4) They nicely tiled the balcony with black tiles then tiled round the edges with the cream tiles left over from the bathroom because they'd run out of the black ones.
5) They measured up my hifi units, speakers, speaker stands, plotted the floorplan on a chart and installed the (not cheap) speaker cable in the floor, returning 20 metres spare cable to me, before cementing over it and installing the real wood flooring. The wires are all 10cm too short to connect to the hifi.
6) The light switches are all randomly assigned and connected to a computer control system so the same switch does different things at different times for no apparent reason.
7) The electrically operated blind on my study window was installed 20cm too short. The proposed solution? Install a 20cm-wide blind in the gap.
I think I've only discovered one last biggy (I'm sure others will surface):
8) The oven doesn't work (yes, an oven, in China!). The reason is, apparently, that they installed a gas oven (even though I specified electric) and that there's no gas to connect it to (although there is an electric point). But... the fitters didn't tell anyone so it was left up to me trialling the appliances to discover it.
Don't be surprised if the apartment burns down (or the entire building) before too long!
2 comments:
Fear of my house burning down with people in it led the local building regulations inspector to insist that the velux window in our loft be set ridiculously low, so that it would be easy to climb out of (which, having kids, I see as more of a risk) in case of a fire.
Then a different inspector came out and said that the base of the window was 20cm too far from the edge of the roof (the idea being that you can only clamber so far down to the awaiting fireman's ladder).
However, we cannot put it any lower as it has to be 60cm above the floor (!) and options such as have a rolled up chain ladder or a rail to hold on to are not permitted.
So the result is that we are obliged to have firedoors installed throughout the house with sprung door-closers to hurl them at our kids. The firedoors have to be installed with a gap to allow the smoke to come out, so that the three smoke detectors will sound.
Had we known all that, we could have left the velux window where it was originally.
I hope somebody died for all this?
I'm certain I'd be in jail if I'd endured that shite...but I bet Paul's having a giggle.
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