Demolition with my Chechen friends

How does one supervise workers when it’s freezing cold, there is no wall in the living room, there’s no working toilet in the entire house and it’s nearly unbearable to spend more than an hour in the house at a time? Very superficially. The end result: my over-eager Chechen friends basically removed every shred of drywalling within sight on the ground floor. Part of this was necessary, but I fear that the vast majority of what was removed was not. You can tell me knocking on the wall as if it were a door. If the sound is soft and muted, the drywalling in solid and properly attached the wall. If the sound is louder, as the knock reverberates through multiple layers of drywall and the plaster knocks up against the brick, there’s a problem (often due to humidity). And the plaster needs to be removed.

Did these guys test the quality of the plaster everywhere it was removed? No. I know then because I personally tested many parts of the dry walling during the first phase of demolition on the ground floor soon after the flood with a different (and much more transparent) crew. My guess is that my Chechen friends assumed I was an idiot, wanted me to praise them from their demolition enthusiasm, and subsequently re-hire them apply a new layer of plaster everywhere. But the more good plaster they removed, the more I’ll have to pay for labor and new materials for a fresh coat of plaster. I hate it when laborers try to extract more money from me for unnecessary work and things I never asked for. So, I thanked my Chechen friends for their enthusiastic approach to demolition and I never hired them again.