290 HOW TO MAKE A COUNTRY PLACE 



fancy, through his wonderful mirage language, even before the cellar 

 is dug you are seated on the lawn gazing at a completed dwelling 

 four months to an hour from the day of signing the contract. Poor 

 unsophisticated humanity! If your house is at all pretentious you'll 

 be fortunate if it is not an even six months before you enter your 

 home, if the builder should be rushed with work, and especially if 

 cautions numbers two and three have been omitted in the contract, 

 and there is no time forfeiture working against him. It's human 

 nature to take every job in sight if there is neither bonus nor time 

 limit staring the contractor in the face, or if he has given only a 

 verbal promise, he will handle his men like a pendulum, if he has 

 several jobs, swinging them from one to the other, and will pos- 

 sibly become badly mixed in his "time data" for finishing your house. 

 A threatened spell of rainy weather will dwindle your beehive full 

 of workers on a Saturday pay-day to a couple of lonely carpenters 

 on Monday morning, their occasional hammer taps a travesty on real 

 work, compared with Saturday's progressive din. You take an 

 expensive half-day from business to ascertain the cause of this sudden 

 cessation of activity, and finally locate your gang laying sills and 

 setting up the studding of a new house two or three miles away. 

 Your Saturday payment has been used to start another job. 



Excuses of Contractors. 



Then comes the list of excuses, which I know by heart; some 

 are certainly plausible and at first sight appear unanswerable: "The 

 Georgia pine beams are short ten sticks, and it is unsafe to build 

 higher until they are in place." "The sash came the wrong size." 

 "The soft mud brick delivered is not hard enough for the chim- 

 neys." "Sand that should have been on the job for the masons was 

 on a barge that ran on the flats and cannot be floated until the next 

 perigee tide, which will be weeks off. In the meantime, while wait- 

 ing for sand, the masons began a rush cellar job to last but three 

 or four days," which is a disguised way of saying two weeks, and 

 so on through an extended list. All good excuses, but excuses don't 

 build your house, and you wish to be in it in August, not December. 

 The non-arrival of two loads of sand at a critical time when I was 

 away for three days made four months' difference in date of occu- 

 pancy; everything froze solid, and it seemed unwise to start timber- 

 ing until the stone work was in place. Stone or brick laid in frosty 

 weather may be unsatisfactory, although a neighbor built a brick 

 chimney one hundred feet high, years ago, with the thermometer 

 close to zero, and it still stands. 



Forfeit vs. Bonus. 



But are these discouraging and annoying conditions surmount- 

 able? Certainly, if you have inserted clauses one, two, and three in 

 your contract. If the honest contractor was confronted by a fat for- 

 feit, or saw within his grasp, when the house was finished, a bonus, 



