Sewer line and garage door

The sewer line is scheduled for Monday, and all looks good for this project. We have a contract with plumber who seems decent. We'll have to shower early because they are starting at 8:00 and we won't have any water. I have a 2.5 gallon container I use to make Iced tea, so I think I'll fill that with water to use for the day. Fortunately, with the trenchless replacement we'll have water by the end of the day (as well as a video of our shiny new sewer line - youtube anyone?). The dogs will go to cage-free day care for the day so I don't have to deal with them while dealing the the work at the same time.

I also faxed out the contract for the garage door. I hope the company works out well - they were recommended by the one general contractor we used several times and really like. I'm a little iffy about this garage door company though because they seem to fly by the seat of the pants.

They sent an estimator out who measure and walked us through picking out a garage door an gave us a verbal price. Everyone else I've dealt this puts all this in writing so their business methods seem a little off to me. We decided to do the work, and the estimator needed to come back to measure again. Hmm, this seems strange to me - why not do what you need in one visit? I then asked him what the next step was, a contract perhaps? His response was, "If you want a written contract, sure, we can do that." Okay, again this seems off - who would do work like this without a contract either as a customer or a business? There is so much room for verbal communication to go awry and there are so many details in picking out a door (more than you could imagine) that not putting it in writing is just begging for problems. Not to mention that without a contract I could back out at any time prior to installation and they are stuck with a door they might not be able to use (I wouldn't do this, but it seems weird they would risk it). We also had some very specific, detailed requests that are not standard. The estimator agreed to all of our requests verbally, but seemed unconcerned with putting it in writing.

Not surprisingly, when the first pass at the contract came there were several things missing from it. I had to call the company and remind the estimator of our conversations and he said he would amend the contract and resend it. It all just seems a little loose to me.

There aren't many choices in garage door contractors. There are a few large businesses in this area that do them, and I spoke to two of them and wasn't happy with them. The big box stores like Home Depot and Loew's also do garage doors, but I didn't want to deal with them because then you have a 4 way contract: you, the big box store, the manufacturer and the subcontractor they hire to install it. There was no way we were going to get the door installed the way we wanted with such a bureaucracy. So, we picked the best option we could find, and I hope they are better at installing doors than administration.