The Russian and the Mexicans

As promised The Russian and the Mexicans. For me the worst part of home ownership is there is the owner is expected to take care of his/her property which is a lot of work and expense. Once again if I were able bodied, I think I would and could do a lot of this basic home maintenance by myself. I have to admit I have been somewhat neglectful of our home. Luckily, I have DD in my life who only lets me skate so long before she will intervene and assist me make a decision like home improvement. The last couple o years we have developed a major leak in the roof of our master bathroom. The drip falls—cascades-right over the sink where I shave and get ready for my day. About five years ago, right after the leak started (maybe longer) we had my brother Carl come over and try to find and fix the leak and when that did not work we even had professional roof repair guys over and they too failed in stopping the leaks. After these professional roof repair guys failed we sort of became discouraged and started ignoring the problem and procrastinating the solution and the solution was a complete new roof! We found out the roof which was on the house was one for about four which was two more then is legal in our fair city. I sort of think we procrastinated as long as we did also because Utah has been in a multi-year drought. We had a few leaks when the snow would melt and when the rain did finally fall we would have the leaks but the leaks would stop right after the rainfall. But this year has been different, much more snow it seams and rain fall this Spring changed everything. I could have gone on but DD had had enough.

In my family wee did all that kind of stuff ourselves, my dad would have never hired someone to do such a thing. So, my dad and my brother an myself were on the roof laying down the shingles. I have a brother, nephew and cousins here in Salt Lake I know I could call on and would call on when the time came. DD comes from a family of all girls and they never did such things as roof the roof. So, we started getting bids and they ranged anywhere from 5,000 to 16,000.00 all or which scared me to death. I do not do well spending big money. I drug my feet and stalled but DD did excellent research and compiled great data. DD has some money in her 401 K and I had a lot, by my standards but not enough to live on as a pension but enough which could make a difference on something like a remodel or a roof project. I began to thaw to the idea of having strangers up on the roof putting shingles down. We ha working capitol.

Last Summer my son had his roof replaced and spoke quite highly of the fellow who did the job. Ziam. Ziam seems to have done a good job at a good price and we started seriously considering the fellow. DD has been mostly working with Ziam and indicated he had an accent but seemed OK. In the past hen we had done some building projects one was fairly large and we were naive and half way through the project we were red tagged and had to tear the whole project down since wee did not have papers, i.e. building permits, etc. So now we were being through. We had not made a decision on Thursday night and so we were a little shocked when about 6:30 on Friday morning Ziam called and wanted to know where to park the dumpster to put the roof tear down in. We were to meet with Ziam later that morning to go over all the arrangements an to be sure Ziam had all his papers in order. This is when realized just how significant Ziam's lack of understanding the English was. DD finally got Ziam to understand we wanted to have one last meeting at our local Beans and Brew.

The meeting at the B&B as my first meeting with the large Slavic who I am fairly certain is Russian. I am not sure even at this meeting how much Ziam understood what was being said. Ziam has sad almost childlike eyes and has a strong desire to please. Ziam just nodding his head and saying 'sure, sure sure” to everything said. We decided to go with Ziam. With in an hour Ziam had his crew Mexicans up on the roof tearing at least thirty years of shingles free down to the boards.

Ziam, drives a nice “contractors” truck late model something with a four door cab. He seems to have four or five jobs going at any given time. His cell phone is always ringing and his eyes always seem on the move. The whole event of the re-roofing of our house was almost surreal Ziam barely speaks or understands English and I think even less Spanish. But here he I wrangling a force of four to five some just kids, like twelve or so years old. I really doubt any or documented but these guys worked hard and long and fast. I really thought they might have the job completed by Saturday night, but that was too much to hope for. The weather was warm and I was outside reading and watching the project there was one moment when the workers were sitting down and some sort of negations were taking place—finally I heard one of the Mexican men say something about $100.00 and Ziam grunted and the whole crew went back to work.

Ziam was in and out of the job, really only actually being on site a small portion of the time-but the job got done and we paid in cash to Ziam and the Mex's delight I am sure.

Ziam's bid was the lowest and we seemed to have gotten everything we wanted. We have a thirty year warranty which I am sure I will be long dead before the warranty is up. Its nice to know the water is going to stay off my head this coming winter when the snows melt.