So, remember when I mentioned awhile back that we have a strange house? Well, it’s true. The layout is bizarre and the rooms are quite closed off. It’s fine for everyday life, but not so great for entertaining, which we want to do a lot of here. It’d be no big deal if we had good outside entertaining space, but unfortunately there’s none of that either.
Since this was really important to us, we decided to just bite the bullet and pay to have a patio built. As I was interviewing contractors for brick patios, I started liking the idea of a deck more (seemed less expensive and reminded me of home). So we ended up going with a 45 sq meter deck.
We hired a carpenter and got an initial quote of $1500. He thought it would be complete in about a week. Turns out most business people have no capital here because it’s so hard to get loans. So on the first day of the job he asks me for $1000 to go purchase the wood. Didn’t feel super comfortable giving all this money to a stranger up front, knowing he could just take off, but that’s how business is done here and if we wanted a deck then we needed to roll with it.
The next day he showed up with some wood for the posts, but none of the floor boards. He informed me that they were being custom cut for us. In the meantime, he went about hand-whittling each of the posts that would go into the ground. Can we say time consuming?!
Days passed and still no floorboards. After about a week I confronted him on it and was told that the lumberyard couldn’t cut it because there was no power during the day (Malawi’s power company supplies roughly 6 hours of power a day right now, often during the middle of the night). And the workers couldn’t come at night when the power was on due to overtime regulations.
By some miracle the power was actually on the next morning, so he went down to the lumberyard to pressure them to prioritize our order. Lo and behold, later that day the boards got dropped off! But something seemed off. They seemed really thin for deck flooring (they were about 3/4 inch by 4 inches instead of the usual 2 x 4’s). I said something but he assured me it was fine. So I let it go.
Several more days pass before both Nick and I are called out to talk. Turns out the planks WERE cut incorrectly (his error) and now he needed another $700 to go get new planks cut. He initially thought he could borrow the money from a friend, but ended up coming back the next day asking us if we could loan him the money. UGHH. We said no and insisted that he figure it out. I was sure he was going to just bail and that we’d never get a deck, but two days later the wood arrived. I still have no idea where he got the money, but in that moment I was grateful for his integrity as a businessman.
So the deck planking finally began about 2 weeks into the project. I was shocked by how manual it all was. String for leveling, hand saws, etc. It was slow going folks. The good news was that he did good work and it was looking really nice. So I just let go of the timeline and waited it out.
Toward the end of the project he informed us that he bought more materials than he had stated in the quote and needed to be reimbursed for them (and no receipts, mind you). The grand total for the additional materials: another $500. At this point, we just wanted him to finish and go away, so we just handed over the money.
Despite the extra materials, he hadn’t calculated correctly and we were short wood. There was NO WAY we were putting more money in this and starting over at the lumber yard again, so we just left it unfinished. If you look behind the chaise loungers in the photo below, you’ll see what we weren’t able to do. We also scrapped some low railings.
By the grace of God we finally got a (mostly) finished deck after 4 weeks and $2000. And, truth be told, the craftsmanship is good. The process gave me one long headache, but at least it’s done and we can lounge in peace. Now the real test will be seeing if it holds up when we host our first party later this month…
Since we never got railings on and I don’t want people falling off when it’s dark out, we’re going to make a perimeter with hedging. Hopefully it’ll look decent.
Big thanks to the Embassy for our awesome patio furniture. Way nicer than we ever expected!
Here’s another angle. It really is quite spacious – turned out much larger than we thought it would be.
Hope some of you will be coming to enjoy our deck with us in 2017!
