The job that overran

Sônia and Jandir signed the same day book for twenty-two weeks, and in twenty-two weeks nobody who came through that flat saw the two of them disagree out loud.

She is the architect and she is forty-one. He is the site foreman and he is fifty-five, and he started as a labourer in 1989, which he mentions whenever somebody new turns up thinking they know how to lay a floor.

The flat is seventy-eight square metres in a 1974 block, with a solid slab, a cast iron soil stack and an owner who lives abroad and followed the whole thing on video, on Thursdays, always ten minutes late.

The programme said fourteen weeks.

The two of them worked in a way the trades talked about, and talked about well.

She arrived at twenty past seven. He arrived at half six, because the foreman is the one who opens up. The two of them walked the flat together before any work started, always in the same order: utility, bathroom, main bedroom, living room, kitchen.

The two of them measured everything twice. She used a laser, he used a tape, and when the numbers disagreed they did both again without arguing about whose error it was.

The two of them signed the day book at the end of the day, on two lines, one under the other.

The two of them gave people a telling-off when it was called for, and they gave it separately: she dealt with suppliers, he dealt with the trades, and neither of them ever corrected the other in front of a third person. That is rare. On a renovation it is close to unheard of.

On a building job the first couple to form is a professional one, and it is nearly always the only one that forms.

In week three they opened up the bathroom wall and the soil stack had three millimetres of wall thickness left where the nominal is six.

Replacing a stack needs the management company's consent, access to the flats above and below, and a leaseholders' meeting. It took five weeks.

In week nine the porcelain arrived, and it arrived with two boxes from a different batch, which is the kind of thing you find out when the afternoon sun comes across and the wrong batch pulls grey.

In week twelve the neighbour downstairs put in a formal complaint about the hours the breaker was running.

The owner abroad was told about each of those on the following Thursday, on video, and took all three well, which nobody expected.

The Thursday calls ran forty minutes and had a fixed order: she presented the physical progress, he came on screen to answer anything to do with execution, and at the end the three of them talked about money. The owner always signed off with the same question, which was whether anything could be brought forward, and the answer was always no. Across twenty-two weeks he asked it twenty-two times.

The date slipped to eighteen weeks. Then to twenty.

The screed went down in the living room on a Friday in July.

Screed is sand and cement ruled off with an aluminium straightedge over a mesh, and once it is down it has to cure. For the first thirty-six hours nobody walks on it. Nobody goes in. The whole job stops, and it is the only moment in a renovation when a flat is empty and clean at the same time.

On the Saturday morning the two of them went over to check the levels, which is a ten-minute job and needs no trades.

There was nobody there. The service lift was off because the block shuts it down at weekends. The flat smelled of wet cement, which is a clean smell, and the living room was one grey plane of screed from wall to wall, perfectly flat, without a mark on it.

The two of them stood in the doorway looking at that for a length of time with no technical justification whatsoever.

Then they went through to the main bedroom, which is the only room where the old floor was still down, and where two trestles had been standing since week one with a solid timber door laid across them as a bench.

The door is cedar, eighty-two centimetres wide, and holds two hundred kilos, according to him, who worked that out in week one for another reason.

The two of them left at twenty to twelve.

The level check was done. It came out at two millimetres of fall over three metres, inside tolerance, and it is written in Saturday's day book in his handwriting.

Work started again on the Monday with the full crew and eight weeks still to run.

The two of them went on arriving at the same times. They went on measuring twice. They went on signing the day book on two lines, one under the other, and they went on not correcting each other in front of anybody.

There was no second time. That is not squeamishness and it is not regret: a job like that has people inside it from seven until five, every day, and the Saturday of the screed was the only day in twenty-two weeks when that flat stood empty.

They knew that on the Friday. The two of them agreed the time on the Friday, by message, with the word "levels" written in the message.

Handover was on a Wednesday in November. The owner flew in, walked through the flat, opened and shut every door, which every client does, and paid the final valuation on the spot.

At the start of this story it says that in twenty-two weeks nobody saw the two of them disagree out loud. That is wrong, and it has to be corrected here.

They disagreed once. It was in week fifteen, about the grout colour in the bathroom, and it was loud enough that the painter went down a floor and waited it out.