Never Start a Project on a Monday

Our contractor said he never starts a new project on a Monday.  In his opinion, it's a recipe for disaster.  He'll use Monday to set up and make sure all the logistics are in order, but he won't take that first swing with a sledge hammer and officially "start".  Therefore, he scheduled our huge house renovation to start tomorrow, a Tuesday.  But then one of his sub-contractors had a scheduling conflict and in order to keep our project on schedule, he agreed to start the project today, a Monday.

This morning started out beautifully.  It was unseasonably cool, which was welcomed by the framers who had arrived at our house at 7:30 this morning, because they were going to spend the day in the sun ripping off the roof on the back end of our house.  But even more important to a bunch of guys who were literally going to open up our house to the sky, the forecast called for only a 10% chance of shower later in the day. After double-checking the forecast, our contractor gave the go-ahead to start pulling off the roof.  Despite being a Monday.

By the time I arrived home from work, the sun had been covered by clouds and we had already experienced a heavy shower.  I was relieved to see a gigantic tarp over what used to be our roof.  The kids and I sat down to dinner when it started to rain again.  I didn't think anything of the weather until it sounded like it was raining inside the house.  Uh oh.  I peaked through the slit in the plastic sheet dividing the demolition zone from the untouched part of our house.  Water was pouring through holes in the tarp onto what was now saturated fiber boards that our contractor had laid down to protect the hardwood floors.

The 10% chance of showered turned into hours of rain.  Yet every time I looked out the window, I could see blue sky in the distance.  It seemed like a rain cloud was sitting directly over our exposed house.  In a last-ditch effort to try to contain the water, I put trash bag-lined buckets underneath the streams flowing through the tarp.

Never start a project on a Monday, I thought.