I'm quite angry. Tired, sore and angry. The damned paint crew didn't prep the upstairs rooms as I'd been told they would; the drywall folks told me the painters would vacuum along the base of the wall and each electrical outlet before painting. They also told me if I vacuumed it would save the painters a couple hours of time.
So I vacuumed the downstairs on Wednesday, had to leave before I could work upstairs. No problem, I figured; the painters would finish what I didn't get to and I'd saved them some amount of time.
Wrong.
They applied a coat of primer and two coats of builder's white paint right over all that sanding dust from the mudding on the drywall. There are sticky gobs of painted dust all along the entire wall perimeter, and every outlet box -- light switch, fan controls, cable, network -- are full of painted-in dust and chunks of mud.
It took me more than an hour and a half to clean most of this crap out of one of the kids' rooms. And there's still junk painted in so that I can't get it out. Last thing I needed to do after sweeping and cleaning the basement and the first floor today.
What did these paint wienies think? Or didn't they? Worse, the project manager tells me not to worry about it...huh? The carpet guy isn't going to scrape this up; he's just going to put pad right over it, no matter how lumpy it is. The finish trip guy isn't going to scrape it out; he's just going to spend more labor hours trying to fit the trim around it.
I'm sure the project manager thinks I'm just being a clean freak -- but this kind of detail bugs the hell out of me. It costs us somewhere to leave it there, whether in the form of more labor or lumpy flooring or dust that shows up months and years later as the house settles.
Another lesson learned: watch them like a hawk and demand specific performance all along the way, even down to surface preparation and dust/waste removal.
I'll be spending my weekend cleaning up the rest of three bedrooms, five closets, two bathrooms and a hallway before the flooring folks show up on Monday. Oh yeah, the basement, too. We agreed that for a couple hundred more dollars it would be worth having the painters put two coats on the entire basement.
But I'm not leaving the prep work to those wienies. I'll be doing that this weekend, too.
Hope you have something more exciting planned for this weekend! Do tell.
4:26:21 PM 
