more prep

the painting crew showed up bright and early today.  leaving a single worker to do more scraping, sanding, caulking and priming the crew leader left with the tools and remaining personnel for another job.  he said he'd be back in an hour but that was four hours ago and there's been no sign of him. 
      [he never did return, other than to collect the lone scraper]

this comes as no surprise -- the builder always seems to be rushing around to redeploy resources to some other job, and there's no reason to expect his subs to operate any differently.  whenever there's anybody here working it's enough to make me feel guilty for all the other unknown jobs which they have had to set aside for the sake of this one. 

unlike the trim carpentry, which has run on a time-and-materials basis, the painting was bid on a fixed price.  I do expect these folks to know what they're doing -- the painting sub came out and surveyed the work before bidding -- but I do wonder whether he appreciated the full extent of prep required and whether he scheduled his people accordingly.  at any rate what matters is for them to get the surface prep right, which they do seem to be doing.