Learned a Costly Lesson

I learned a costly lesson. There've been some in the past and I'm sure there will be some in the future. One thing I'm going to add to my Notes section, is to make sure you learn all of the environmental and shelf life information of the products you'll be using. I only learned yesterday that we have a problem with our waterproofing material.

When we'd opened our most recent bucket of the material, I noticed that a considerable amount of the material (approximately 25%) was in a clump. I e-mailed the manufacturer about it, and asked 2 questions. I asked if there was a way to mix the material and get it "unclumped" and I also asked if using the non-clumped material made it any less effective.

The good news is the answer to the second question is no. The bad news is that the answer to the first question is "probably no".

They told me that the shelf life of the material is about 6 months. They are about to release a newer version of the product that doesn't have this issue, but for now, we're losing approximately 25% (or more) of what we have left to do the job. So it'll probably cost me more money to get more of the material to finish the job.

I wish that Jay had told us that the product had a limited shelf life. If he had, we probably wouldn't have bought it until we needed it. We bought it ahead of time, figuring that we'd have it on hand and that we'd get to the job when we could. Now we're taking an expensive loss. It'll probably cost us around $400, but I'm not sure if that estimate is high or low.