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Fidelis returned the first revision of the quote within a reasonable amount of time but the amount was about 15% higher than the budget we had set aside for our Dream Home. We ended up meeting with Fidelis to have a discussion about how to reduce the cost and Fidelis suggested to just chop the house in half. That sounded like an excellent idea, good grief, Fidelis is an architectural genius, pulls an innovative design right out of his ass right on the spot without needing even 20 seconds to think. Chop the Dream Home that took us months to design and obtain permits for in half to reduce the cost by 15%. We were so flabbergasted by this magic trick that we didn't even realise that chopping the house in half should make it close to 35% cheaper.

Side note: If you have not yet done so, we strongly do encourage you to visit https://batirconstructionsltd.co.ke/ and take a look at the claims on the home page as well as at the "What we offer" section on the "About Us" page, it will prevent our readers from bursting our tears when reading our articles because the outrageous claims Fidelis makes on his website are all falsehoods enabling us to turn this blog into a comedy show rather than a drama. 

We discussed a few other things such as making sure the lumber would be ordered from Nairobi because the local lumber yards only sell wood that is not well seasoned and often more crooked than not. Fidelis also inquired about the quality of local labourers, but we strongly recommended him to not use them because they are mostly local herdsmen who do nothing but walking behind livestock whose definition of work is "getting paid to be present". When Mrs. Menace asked the question "how long will it take before we can move in?"QS Fidelis answered: "3 months.". Naz thought it was best to add about 2 months to that to make sure things were done plumb, level and straight/square rather than doing a rush job.

Revised Drawings and Quotes

Anyhow, rather than chopping our dream home in half we agreed to slightly modify the design. After having taken about 50cm off of all sides, eliminating 2/3 of the balcony on the first floor and making a cavity in the laundry room to accommodate an open air area to dry our clothes we submitted the changed layout revisions for a revised quote. The revised quote showed up after a few days with the total amount being almost identical to the initial quote. After comparing the 2 quotes we noticed that some items had received a rate increase. To make things a bit easier we asked Fidelis to send the excel spreadsheet used for the quote rather than the pdf and guess what? The template used for the quote had a few hidden columns giving the reasons for changes such as: "ADDITION: HAD OMITTED GLAZING TO DOORS", "ADDITION: HAD OMITTED PAINTNG TO DOORS", "ADDITION: HAD MEASURED PAINTNG TO ONE SIDE", "ADDITION; HAD BEEN OMMITTED" etc, etc. Not only that.......some fields that should have a formula to calculate a quantity*rate were hard entries, for example:

Item UNIT QTY RATE TOTAL    
50 mm screed topping SM 178 700 49,600    

Being the honest people we are we informed Fidelis about the calculation errors in his template, kept silent about the numerous spelling mistakes and let him take off a few unneeded items. Fidelis sent us back a revision with a few changes but assured us that the hard entries, which were still in the quote, were rounding errors.  Okay, whatever, in the end we received a small discount due to calculation errors we informed Fidelis about but he "OMITTED" to correct them.

January 14th, Inception of Construction

Exciting day, Fidelis shows up in his vehicle with some people and shortly thereafter a lorry arrived with:

    • some 2M and 3M mabati sheet
    • 2, 3 and 4" nails, roughly 1KG of each
    • Round poles
    • 6x1 timber
    • 2 doors without a frame
    • 6 hinges
    • a handful  of shovels
    • 7 gnarly mattresses
    • 1 long spud bar
    • 2 wheelbarrows
    Shortly thereafter a few other casuals and fundis with basic tools such as 7.5M measuring tapes, hammers and hand saws arrive. The crew is ready to start building their sleeping unit and storage area, but wait.......Fidelis forgot pangas. While 30% of Kenya is built with a panga (KES500 machete) and therefore the most basic tool for half the Fundis, yet Fidelis forgot to buy pangas. No problem, Fidelis instructed a casual labourer to go and borrow some pangas from the local, mostly Maasai, Samburu and Turkana, people. Obviously we want our dream home project to kick-off and we actually know that the locals will not loan someone anything without charging an exorbitant amount of money so we told Fidelis not to worry and loaned him 2 pangas. 
    Our Nightmare with QS Fidelis and Batir Construction LTD had begun.