The best laid plans

On Monday morning I thought 'today is the day, at last' - the hall, stairs and landing carpet was to be fitted today, surely everything that could have gone wrong had already done so. But unfortunately not where carpets and we are concerned. Before the carpet fitter was through the front door he was telling me that the gripper rods in the hall would need to be glued to the tiles and the glue takes twelve hours to set so they wouldn't be able to fit the carpet in the hall today and he was also concerned that there were radiator pipes under the floor. I advised him that we had not changed things since the estimator had been and asked why he hadn't picked up these problems. It turned out that the estimator had marked the paper work to the effect that the gripper rods needed gluing. This should have been picked up at the store and the carpet fitters should have come the day before to glue the gripper rods. Still they were here now and would have to make the best of the situation which meant fitting the carpet on the landing and stairs and gluing the gripper rods to the hall floor and they would have to come back another day to finish the job. It would have to be the same two fitters as they were contractors and now that they had started the job no other fitter would touch it. So we agreed that they would return after 2 pm on Wednesday to finish the job. I naively expected that they would be here around 2 pm, but they didn't arrive until about 3.30 pm and then spent about ten minutes looking at the engine of their van. I hoped that their hands were clean - I didn't want engine oil on my new beige carpet. So at last the carpet is down. But for how long? Already I suspect that we will have to take up the landing carpet as the uneven floor boards make it look more like a ploughed field than a fitted carpet. The carpet fitter suggested that we lay some hard board on top of the floor boards to give a smoother finish.