Cherie's Place

Whilst enjoying lunch on the patio we were interrupted by a loud knock on the door. Mr C disappeared and emerged around the side of the house with another man. He was assessing the cost of weeding, power-washing and applying weedkiller to our driveway and patio. I am always wary of using the services of people who turn up on my doorstop but on this occasion the van was personalised and had contact phone numbers on the side.

The job needed doing so I accepted Mr C’s judgment.

The work proceeded and I noticed that a lady was doing all the work whilst the man who had knocked on the door was standing drinking pop and giving directions on what to do. Occasionally I heard them arguing, I left them to get on with the job which turned out to be a big mistake on my part.

They kept ringing our doorbell and I had to move my car (from its off drive location) on more than one occasion. When I arrived back from one of my car moves I was confronted with a ‘non social distancing’ encounter… Did we want the drive sanding.

The man was insistent a few minutes after our conversation that Mr C came to talk to him about the sanding. A deal was struck, yes we would like the sanding. What I didn’t realise until later is that the man kept gesticulating to Mr C (demanding attention) as he was looking outside from his office window whilst on a telephone conference.

There was a bit of a saga about money as they left for the day saying they would come back the next day to finish the job when the corner of the patio had dried out. Could we pay them some cash? No we could not we would pay the money into their bank account.

After they left I realised why the change of heart from bank transfer to immediate cash in hand. At the back of our house they had power-washed all the mud and sand into the corner of our patio rather than free-flowing any mud and sand in the other direction. In doing so they had blocked our kitchen water outflow pipeways causing water to pool on our patio and leaving it impossible to use our kitchen sink and washing machine.

Later as we were dining we were again interrupted. Have you paid me? I can’t see the money!

Fortunately we have a service contract that covers blocked pipes and a lovely young man came to our rescue first thing in the morning.

Later that morning we received a phone call from the ‘weeding & dealing’ power-wash man to say that his father had been rushed into hospital so he couldn’t finish the job that he started.  What a con man! We finished cleaning up the mud and sand from the patio.

Then I went for long walk in the afternoon sunshine

Tags: Life, Lunch, Patio