Just stick to the plan, guys...
FINALLY...two and a half months after it was supposed to happen...the floor has been redone at work. All started because I felt it was ridiculous that the floor should be in that condition in the first place...so I bought some wood filler and started filling in all the holes where the finish had peeled up and taken out slivers and shards of wood, or where people had thumped stuff on the floor so hard they'd made dents in it.
That all needed to be sealed, somehow, of course...so I sent a request up the chain of command about what needed to happen to do that. The initial plan was, maintenance would get us the equipment, we'd have to do the labor. Fine, no problem...I've never finished a floor before but I'm pretty generally handy and if I know the theory behind something, I can usually figure out how to make it happen.
Then they decided they were renting equipment to do a floor somewhere else, so they'd do ours at the same time. No problem...we got the floor ready for them to work on before the decided date, and waited.
No-show. Call to find out. The other floor wasn't ready yet, so they hadn't rented the device. Fine...when will it be ready? We'll let you know. Okay, well, the floor needs to be done by this date, so we can rehearse on it. No problem...
That date comes...and goes...no-show. Another call. Other floor's still not ready. Rehearsals are happening, will it be ready by this weekend? Should be...
We clear all their gear after the last rehearsal, get everything ready again. And another no-show, with another call...they have the machine, they just couldn't get a crew (prior to this time, they always had a crew, they just didn't have the machine...) Another week of rehearsals, all the stuff gets taken down again...
This time, they show up...and do about a third of the floor. Apparently, they weren't expecting to have to strip the old finish off the floor and it was gumming up their machine, so they quit partway through. But they'll be back in a few days with a stripping compound...in the meantime, can I sand all the places where I put down the filler? The job will go faster that way...so I immediately drop everything and take care of that.
Two weeks later, they come in to start working on the floor...without the stripping compound. Apparently, they've found something that doesn't require taking the old finish all the way down to bare wood, so they just need to scuff the floor to make it stick (floor's plenty scuffed already, but whatever). Now the OTHER show is rehearsing on it, dancing for four hours each day...so they can't finish it. We'll call them when rehearsals are done, they'll leave everything there, and that way, they can come in and get it all done right away.
Rehearsals were over three weeks ago. Nobody was doing anything. I've used floor buffers before, so I said 'screw it' and buffed the floor. Found the floor stripper that had gotten dropped off sometime, put that down, and buffed the floor again. Told my boss to pin down the guy in charge of the project for maintenance, because we needed an applicator to put the finish down (I called him last week, he said he'd drop one off...still not there...) My boss informs me that the guy in question is out of town.
At that point, my patience is shot. I go to Home Depot and buy an applicator and come back and put down the new finish. It's not a perfect job, but it's leaps and massive bounds beyond what we had before. If they'd just left all the stuff there, in the first place, like was the original plan, it would have been done by the middle of April.
Thanks guys...good to know exactly where we stand on your priority list...(and people wonder why I've gotten in the habit of just going ahead and tackling projects for our department without contacting the 'proper' departments to do them for us...)