Dejado por el workawayer (Delphine) para el anfitrión
We had a very disappointing experience at Sergey's.
It started well, with a warm welcome, nice chat and lovely lunch but it quickly turned sour when we discussed work. I had been in touch with Sergey for a few weeks before we arrived at his place so he had time to ask why we offer 3 hours of work daily (we actually mostly do 4) but when we
… read more reexplained he tried to negociate and his behaviour changed straight away. To be clear, the reason why we offer this deal is because we have our own caravan – we only connect to electricity & use host's bathroom for shower – and because Seb is a carpenter and he has many tools with him which allows him to offer our host profesionnal work.
Despite what Sergey says, Seb is a very good carpenter and has over 10 reviews here on Workaways that will prove that. There is no need for us to justify ourselves here.
We work together 3 to 4 hours a day, which doesnt mean we share the work load. We work 3/4h each. Plus, obvisouly Sergey has no idea of the amount of time and skills a door and frame take to be done. He was arrogant and had no consideration for the job done, only seeing the defaults and maximising the time trying to have as many things as possible done (knowing that doing this type of work: door, frame. shelves, etc is impossible without professional tools).
Also, it is important to clarify that at Sergey's place, we had to use our own caravan bathroom for both shower and toilet. We had no internet. We also had no free access to the kitchen outside the “dining' which were pretty strict and short , and outside which we had no social interaction with the host. A good point to highlight too is that we stayed 5 days there, but as we had worked only Thursday and Friday, we told him not to worry for the food over the week-end. So basically, we worked for 3 days for 3 days of food (which was good or often prepared or made of ingredients given by neighbour lady) without accomodation.
For future reference, the caravan he is proposing as an accomodation for people is in very poor state and has no bathroom.
Finally, we left on Monday morning after finishing our job because we had a little “issue”. While cutting the door, we broke the blade of our circular saw as long as the plane iron as Sergey wanted us to renovate an old Exotic wooden door. There were metal nails inside the door that could not be seen from outside. Therefore, we explained the situation to Sergey when he got back, and that we will need replacement for this equipement (which costs 80e on the net) and that without it, we won't be able to work more as we can't work on wood. He was not happy with that, which we can understand as it is extra spendings, but again his reaction was bad, pretending he only had 50 euros left on his account and he had to borrow money from the neighbours and friends, trying to negotiate and going 50/50, etc. He just left the conversation unended and retired into his quarters. Renovation always brings surprises and maybe you should not take that road if you are not ready to spend a little money only use people as slaves to restaure a house that you can no longer pay for.
Icing on the cake, by 2 pm (after the incident and so called – explanation), he came back to me - as I was filling the water of the caravan for our showers – and said he had no time to cook and tried to hand me 2 uncooked steaks and a pack of dry spaghetti for us to cook. Stunned, Seb grabbed them and Sergey just left the house for hours.
That is when we decided to leave the place. We packed and waited for him to come back to say goodbye and leave. He didn't even have the decency to send us to the gate or anything.
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