I’m pitting my housemate here. He is a fucking idiot. He is my ex-partner and unfortunately we bought a house together. When we bought it our plan was to remodel the house and sell it. The ‘we’ being me because he is completely incompetent when it comes to anything technical.
The house was carpeted throughout. I’ve pulled up all the carpeting to refinish the floors. The upstairs is all pine plank. He claimed he would help with some of the more tedious parts of the job like sanding and scraping the grit between the planks. He put maybe 2 hours in then disappeared when I was around working. Never put any more effort into helping on that project. I sanded the floors stained them and poly’ed them. Since then he can’t grasp concepts like not dragging book cases across his fucking room.
The beginning of Nov he pressured me into starting the living room and dinning room floors. I had obligations for the first 2 weekends so couldn’t start until mid November. I sanded the floors then he informed me he had family coming over for thanksgiving so he needed to use those rooms. I couldn’t put any polyurethane down because we needed to move furniture and such into the rooms to accommodate the guests.
He decided he needed to move the cast iron radiators back into those rooms by himself when I wasn’t home. Since he isn’t strong enough to pick them up and not smart enough to us a dolly he walked them across the floors. Leaving pivot marks in the bare wood across the room. He knocked one over in the process, so I have 6 nice big cross grain marks.
I expressed my unhappiness with his stupidity and explained that you need to be very careful with bare wood. It has nothing protecting it. Anything you move or and anything you spill or drop will leave permanent marks. I spent some time with an iron steaming out most the marks and a bit of sanding with a palm sander later, I’d mostly corrected things.
Then he decided to inform me he was having a party for his birthday this weekend. I told him he could use the living room but had to cover it with area rugs and keep beverages in there to a minimum.
Now downstairs I have multiple people in my dinning room dancing. 4 of them are wearing high heels. I can see the nice marks those are leaving behind.
I feel for you…we have an old house we are restoring, and so I know how much work it is. Our house also has pine floors in some of the rooms, so I also know how easy they are to damage. I would probably commit murder if I saw someone pushing a radiator across them. It makes me mad just thinking about it, because pine floors are so beautiful if they are taken care of. Grrrrr.
If it’s financially feasible, you might want to consider either buying his half or selling yours. You can’t change his idiocy, but you can get out of the situation.
If he scrapes it, he had damned well better repair it, or pay for the repair of it! :mad: Show him the costs (including pay for hours for someone else to come in and do the work) of fixing his screwups. Maybe cold hard numbers will make him take more care?
I think sometimes you just need to cut your losses. Forget about getting him to pay for any repairs, buy him out (maybe deduct some money for repairs from your offer), but get him out before he does some real damage.
That’s a good question…it DOES sound like he is taking some resentment out on your floors, maybe? If so, I would doubly take everyone’s advice and try to buy him out! He obviously doesn’t care as much about this project as you do, anyway, and if he is trying to sabatoge it, get him out of there!
A tip I was taught by my grandfather to remove dents left in pine (usually from a hammer missing the nail) was to lay brown paper over the dent and run over it withy a warm steam iron. Given the amount of damage you describe this may be a herculean task by the sounds of it.
I third (fourth? fifth?) getting him the hell out of the house you’re trying to fix up. He obviously has no interest in doing the work, and doesn’t care about wrecking the work you’ve done.