Monthly Archives: July 2005

I had some stucco repair work done by Foley Stucco this spring. (Foley Stucco is a stucco company in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul.) They were nice at first: friendly and accommodating and they returned my calls and showed-up when they said they would. When I signed on the bottom line they came out and did the work and it looked good and they were clean and everything seemed great.
Then a couple of weeks went by and I noticed some cracks in my brand new stucco. WTF? New stucco shouldn’t crack, should it? So I called up Foley Stucco. And – surprise – the dude at Foley Stucco didn’t call me back. So I called again. And this time the Foley Stucco dude did call me back. And – surprise – the nice accommodating dude had been replaced by an irrational jerk. And he yelled and screamed for a while about how I was out of line for questioning their work and that I didn’t understand stucco and blah blah blah I sorta tuned out the rage. Eventually he calmed down and told me he’d call the guy who actually did the work and get back to me. And a day or so later the worker dude called me and – doing his best jerk immitation – explained to me that I’m the idiot because I didn’t know that the new stucco was going to crack even though all he ever said during the sales process was “it’ll look beautiful” and not “it’ll look pretty good, but it’ll have a couple of big cracks in it”. In his defense, he probably forgot that part. Whoops. He also said a bunch of other “it’s your fault, not mine” type of stuff. I love that crap, but it’s not worth typing out.
After a few minutes the worker jerk agreed to come over and have a look. And lo and behold a couple of weeks later he did, though he didn’t call first and when he got here he left his engine running. Because I wasn’t home at the time, he explained to my wife that the cracks were nothing to worry about because they were small and small cracks are totally expected during this type of work, and, oh yeah, your husband must be an idiot for not knowing how stucco works.
So I left it at that. For all I know the cracks are normal. I don’t really think they are, but I’ve decided it’s not enough to stress over for now. Plus, I figure by writing this blurb about Foley Stucco somebody might read it and maybe it’ll help them make an informed decision about going with Foley Stucco or not. (Behold the power of the interweb.) If that’s you, let me be clear that I’m not saying you’ll have the same experience I did, but I’m not saying you won’t, either. (I will say that the whole “shouting abusive jerk” act seemed to come come pretty easily, though.) Take my comments for what they’re worth. You’re welcome.

So this new Aldi store opened at like 64th and Penn a while ago. If you don’t know what Aldi is, it’s a basically a grocery store full of