With the building emptying fast, and the finances sorted, we were rapidly approaching go time.
We were having more and more meetings with Pico and more and more intense conversations about the details we had to get sorted out.
I legit lost count of how many meetings we had!
One thing I do wish, is that with the benefit of hindsight, I wish I had known that a project manager should be sending minutes of every meeting we had. This is really important. And if I could go back and tell myself just one crucial thing that I should never miss, it's this; DEMAND MEETING MINUTES FOR EVERY MEETING.
Every. Single. One.
Because when you don't have meeting minutes, anything that you say can and will be ignored. Then when you ask them to explain why they haven't done their jobs properly, they will attempt to gaslight you and they will lie through their teeth and tell you that even though there is one of them and multiple of you who were present at said meetings, they did not say or do any of the things you know they did.
Without evidence to back it up, you are left with a we said - he said situation and it is an absolutely shitty place to be in let me tell you.
So if you are going to embark on ANY form of construction project, set the bar right from the start.
At the first meeting, request they send through the minutes. If anything is missing, make them add it. If anything is incorrect, make them fix it there and then. Don't let them make you wait a day or a week, demand it the same day!
It's a lot like being in a toxic relationship where the aggressor tries to make you feel like you're going crazy. They do everything they can to make you think they are wonderful and amazing and they are only doing these things to look after you and it's all in your best interests of course.
But then, you finally see the light and you kick their abusive ass to the kerb. You throw on your best heels and hit the town, find yourself a new piece of eye candy.
And before you know it, the new bit is showing you that actually everything you expected in a partner is actually completely reasonable and logical. They show you all of the things that should have been done by the ex and they patiently teach you the reasons all of these things are being done and why they are so important.
This pretty accurately gives you an idea of where things are going, as it's really not cool right? Nope.
But I'll get more into that as we move through the journey.
Right now, I'm going to take you back to the paperwork mountain that we had to begin wading through in about September 2019.
Because the contracts we had to sign were quite frankly, ridiculous. But apparently necessary. They were broken down into three large A4 books.
The total height of these books was nearly 30 centimetres. Just to give you an idea of size.
Every page was signed.
And these books had three copies of each - this photo is one set of books.
There were three sets.
Just signing these was an absolute nightmare.
Every page had to be read, there was no one to help and every page read had to be initialled. So they knew you had read it. Which had it's good and bad points, as alongside the signing, this was what began the list.
The list, was a notated indicator of all of the things we didn't know about. It became a list of things that we questioned Pico about. Mostly because before we handed over a copy of these signed documents, we wanted to know the answers to the questions it had raised.
And by this point, we had also met Lorenzo and he had been added to the team, so many of the questions we actually had to very painfully ask Lorenzo. And so many of that list stayed unanswered until well after we had Lorenzo removed from the project.
It took us literally months to actually get through these and sign them and thankfully Maycroft actually began the works well before it was all done - as we had told them we would be signing and we had gone through a number of meetings where we had verbally agreed and discussed and negotiated some terms.
I have to say though, that the finalising of these contracts were good and bad. As they were the beginning of the realisation of how bad things were getting with BECA.
By the time they were signed, we were at a point where at home, discussions were frequently tense. I was frequently irate and unhappy with progressions. He was consistently trusting Pico and talking me down. I would want to get this stuff sorted, and he would convince me that it was okay, Pico had our best interests at heart and he was sorting it. We would go round and round in circles and never get anywhere, other than it was getting more and more difficult for me to keep up with all of the issues.
But we will get more into that! As getting us to here, is where we start with actual progress!!!!
Which is actually a wee bit exciting!
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