I suffered a big loss and can't help but share with everyone to help you avoid the same pitfalls.

The conclusion is, never casually show excessive kindness to construction workers. If you don’t believe me, just listen to what I have to say.
Last year, I was renovating a house in Chengdu, and the foreman brought in three bricklayers. I did a week of research in advance, read over a hundred posts about avoiding renovation traps, but in the end, I still couldn’t help but soften my heart—on a 37-38 degree day in Chengdu in July, the workers started working early in the morning, wearing vests from dawn till night, with sweat dripping from their collars into half a cup.
Every day I went downstairs to buy cold drinks, and I’d bring them two bottles of ice-cold cola. When ordering takeout at noon, I casually asked if they wanted rice added. On the first day of work, I also gave each of them two packs of cigarettes worth over twenty yuan, saying “Brothers, don’t worry about it.”
The foreman patted his chest and told me, “Little brother, you’re very considerate. Don’t worry, I’ll lay the tiles better than I do in my own house, and there won’t be a single hollow sound.”
I’m not very experienced, and since he said so confidently, during the inspection I just knocked on two tiles near the door, and since the sound wasn’t hollow, I signed off. I even paid the over five thousand yuan balance three days early, saying it was so the workers could have money to eat.
At the end of last year, my parents moved in, and less than a month later, the neighbor downstairs came knocking, saying the ceiling was leaking water.
When they opened up the tiles, I was stunned: nearly one-third of the tiles were hollow, and in the bathroom, near the toilet wall, the waterproofing was only half done, with almost half a square meter of the wall left uncoated—this was what caused the water to seep and flood the downstairs.
I quickly called the foreman, but his phone was disconnected. I contacted the bricklayer who had laid the tiles at the time, and he told me over the phone, “The job was assigned by the foreman. I only got 300 yuan a day for this work. If you want to find someone, go find him. It’s nothing to do with me,” and then he hung up. When I called again, he wouldn’t answer.
Later, I hired new workers to redo the work. The master bricklayer told me while prying up the tiles, “You see, it’s because you’ve been too nice to them. We don’t set rules in this line of work. The more polite and easy to talk to you are, the more they think you don’t know anything and can be easily fooled. They won’t bother to spend half a minute to do things properly. If you had started with a stern face and clearly said, ‘Check each tile after laying, and deduct money immediately if there’s hollow sound,’ they wouldn’t dare to slack off.”
I was squatting at the messy bathroom door, staring at the half-open pack of cigarettes left in the corner—just the leftover ones I had given the workers, casually placed there—water vapor had soaked the words on the box.
To this day, I still can’t understand: was I really wrong to show kindness to the renovation workers? Or is it that some people will take others’ politeness as an opportunity to manipulate?
Even my uncle, who has been in the renovation business for twenty years, looked at the scene and sighed, saying to me, “I told you long ago, in our line of work, the kinder you are, the more they’ll ride all over you.” That’s really not an exaggeration.
But I can’t help but wonder, is politeness and kindness actually a mistake in renovation?