Another ignorant person

Must I be constantly besieged by ignorant people? Why is it so hard for people who know nothing about a topic to keep from spouting off about it?

I had to verbally put just such a person in her place today. I was with a group of friends (I don't know this woman) and was updating them on the remodel. She asked if we had a general contractor for the whole job and I said no and explained that first of all we had nobody to ask for references and second of all without knowing you were getting a good person it is a huge risk to place the whole project in one person's hands. Also, you have to pay the contractor's markup on every subcontractor and you lose a lot of control. After seeing how badly some of the contractors screwed up their small area of the job and how bad our prior incompetent contractor was, I am even more sure that this was the best choice. I can't even imagine how bad this project would have been had I put it into the hands of any of the contractors we've dealt with so far (our present guy excepted). Her answer? "(snort)Well, that's why it took you so long." WHAT?!?! What a rude and nasty remark! How obnoxious and how condescending! Talk about not knowing what you are talking about - she doesn't even know me or anything about the project. To just assume that she could swoop in and diagnose the whole problem with one question is unbelievably pretentious.


She said "I know someone you can use." Duh. As if that invalidates my logic. First of all, I needed someone 18 months ago, not now. Second of all, the fact that she knows someone and I ran into her today doesn't change the decision parameters I faced 18 months ago.

The most egregious error in her assumption is that my management screwed things up. I don't believe this for a minute, and in fact seeing my level of staying on top of things and attention to detail, I don't think there is a contractor out there who could have done as good a job as I did. This may sound grandiose, but having worked with about 20 contractors and seen their management style and mine, I'd pick mine any day. She knows nothing of the massive problems of finding decent contractors in this area. Here are just a few of the examples I explained to her:

1) Our prior incompetent contractor was hired for a chunk of work that was difficult to parcel out last spring. He should have been done in May, and in December we finally fired him. Not only was he 7 months behind on 6 weeks of work, but he cost us much more time than that by screwing things up, doing them poorly and not completing things. It's much harder to get someone to fix poorly done work than to get someone to do it in the first place. Our bathroom grout still looks terrible and I've had someone in to fix it.

2) Window egress fiasco - two different general contractors installed our windows and neither had knowledge that would have prevented our windows from not passing inspection. The fact is our city has window standards different than the national building code and these standards are not available in writing. How would turning over project management to them have helped if they didn't have the knowledge to begin with?

3) The plumber dropped the ball on several occasions that cost several months delay. One of the biggest things he missed was that the attic had to be reinforced before installing the heater. Again, neither general contractor knew about this so how would turning over project management to them have helped?

4) We waited almost a month for plans to reinforce the attic. Nothing could happen without those plans. This engineer was recommended by the best contractor we have had to date. Exactly how would having him manage our project change this?

I pretty well negated her statements, but with her feeble reasoning it wasn't hard. After I made mincemeat of her ignorant statement, she had the nerve to imply I'm a poor judge of character by saying "What about your gut instinct on these people?" Gee, what a flash of blinding insight. Thank you for displaying your keen grasp of the obvious. No, really, I never thought of that, I hired people I thought were complete jerks. (Huge sarcasm here in case it's not obvious in writing). Of course I liked everyone I hired, they were all great at first. It's after you get into things and they have your over a barrel it all goes downhill.

A question to ignorant people everywhere: Why can't you just say nothing when you know nothing about a topic? Why do people who have, at this point, way less experience at remodeling than I do insist that they have simple solutions to all my difficulties? It's unbelievably arrogant, especially given that so many remodels go badly. Why would someone who has very little or no knowledge of this presume that they are smarter than all of us experienced remodeling homeowners? It's a whole different conversation when I talk to another remodeling homeowner. I can almost tell how much experience someone has had by what kind of comments they make.