Every Bathroom Needs A Door

So - picture the scene. It's 6am, and I'm rudely woken by persistent ringing of my doorbell. Somewhat bleary-eyed, I don my dressing gown and make my way to the door, to be confronted by the 6"7 bearded man who has been leading the merry troupe of cowboys that have spent the previous three weeks fitting a new bathroom. Somewhat bizarrely, given that he'd just woken me up, he doesn't look happy.

"Why have you made me come round again?" he asks, somewhat abruptly.

"Erm... Well, I was hoping you'd be able to finish off the bathroom..." I mumbled, in what I hoped was a conciliatory tone.

(From this point on I'll leave out the 'erms', 'ahems' and 'ahs', else we'll be here all day.)

It turned out I'd missed the target with the reconciliation. He wasn't pleased.

"What are you talking about? The bathroom's finished. It's beautiful!"

By now we were striding through my flat, heading for the bathroom in question. Well, he was striding - I was shuffling along in his wake.

"Look! Look! It's beautiful! Look at the shower, and the bath! Look at the tiles! It's beautiful!"

"Yes, but..."

"Look at the heated towel rail - it's a beautiful thing!"

By this point I was starting to grudgingly admire his ability for seeing beauty in the most tediously functional of things - but I wasn't to be swayed.

"Yep, and I love it, but that's not really the point - where's the sodding door?"

And he looked at me, slightly suspicious, slightly crestfallen (presumably because I'd failed to appreciate the beauty of a gaping door-frame) and suddenly sullen.

"We never talked about a door. We never said it would have a door."

And I'll leave the story there, and jump to the point - of course we'd talked about a door. Every bathroom needs a door. My bathroom, prior it its renovation, had a door: the door that was now supposed to be hanging in the (beautiful) doorframe; the door that, it transpired, had been mistakenly lobbed in a skip a week earlier. And because I'm a fastidious Suit, I'd kept record of all the conversations we'd had and emails we'd exchanged, and was able to call his (much less physically imposing) boss later that day, and make him come round the following day, with a new door, which he duly fitted. So don't worry about me or my bathroom - we're just fine.

The point, though, is this: keep notes, follow up calls with emails and however you refer to or structure them, produce contact reports. Because there will come a day (and eventually, believe me, there will come several) when you'll be glad that you did.