Sit up late at night thinking about how you really should check your credit card balances but are to afraid that you have spent WAY too much? That's what I'm doing right now. Life feels very expensive these days and this bathroom project isn't helping...
Plus my sleep deprived brain allowed the man at the lumber yard to order us 8 feet of windows instead of 6. 50% fee to cancel order at this point so I guess we will have 8 feet worth of window somewhere in our house, but it won't be in the bathroom!
Ok enough late night rambling.
Monday, June 15, 2009
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Laundry Room
In spite of our plumber troubles, we still ended up with a great laundry room. We just finished it yesterday and it couldn't be better! Here are some pictures:
This is What Happens When You Don't Do It Yourself
So its been a very long time since I last posted, but that's because its been along time since we did any work on the house! Right before Christmas we welcomed our first daughter, Dalila, into the world and have been so busy enjoying her and caring for her that we have neglected our projects. But now that she is a little older and we are more adjusted to being parents, we decided we needed to get back into it or we would never finish our fixer upper.
We decided the next project to tackle would be the laundry room, which would allow us to begin working on our new bathroom. My parents, knowing how hard parenthood can be, offered to pick up the tab on hiring plumbers to do this work so all we would have to do was the cosmetic elements to the projects. Eric was reluctant to give up on plumbing, but after weighing the benefits we decided to hire the plumbers we had always called in an emergency to do the project.
Initially we felt the quote for the work was a bit high considering how long the project was projected to take - roughly 2 days, one day for the laundry room and another for the bathroom. We had talked to other plumbers in our area and none were able to get working right away, so we decided the steep price tag was the price we ( well my parents) would have to pay for the project getting underway immediately.
Things did not go as planned, however. The laundry room took 2 days instead of 1 and when it was inspected it failed, so bringing the work up to code required another day's work. The bathroom ended up taking about 3 days to rough in. For us, this was not a problem; we were grateful to have the work done as soon as requested and the mistakes that had been made when the laundry room failed to be fixed right away.
For the owner of the plumbing company, however, this presented a problem. He now felt he was being underpaid for the job based on the price we had agreed on and without warning or discussion, charged us an addition $2500 on the last day of work, stating the job had taken longer than expected and had been "delayed."
The man apparently could not see reason. He felt we should be paying for the time his guys had to take to fix their own faulty work and for the fact that they worked half days two of the days they worked which made the job take longer(obviously). After an hour long discussion about it, Eric had to tell him we would discuss it further after the weekend. We couldn't see how this was possibly happening - we had signed a contract which he had asked us to sign. We signed it, he signed it and right there on the contract it stated that the cost of the job was fixed. No where on the contract was there anything about how long the project would take, it simply listed the tasks that would be completed for the amount listed.
Come Monday we received a call from the plumber's secretary about how we would be paying for the remainder of our balance plus the addition$2500. Eric told her we were still in negotiation about it and would call her back when we had reached a conclusion. Later that day I received a call from my dad telling me that an enormous charge had been made to his credit card, putting a hold on his card. He wanted to know if we had authorized the charge, which of course, we had not. Can you imagine this company, with out any consent, decided to charge the credit card which we had paid the deposit with?!
My dad put a stop payment on the card and I called the state licensing board because it was getting out of control. When speaking to the licensing board representative, not only was it illegal for a plumber to charge for work that didn't pass inspection, that they were not able to charge more for a job if a contract had already been entered into. These were things which common sense told me, but having the licensing board confirm it prepared us all the more for the next conversation we had with our plumber.
We decided the next project to tackle would be the laundry room, which would allow us to begin working on our new bathroom. My parents, knowing how hard parenthood can be, offered to pick up the tab on hiring plumbers to do this work so all we would have to do was the cosmetic elements to the projects. Eric was reluctant to give up on plumbing, but after weighing the benefits we decided to hire the plumbers we had always called in an emergency to do the project.
Initially we felt the quote for the work was a bit high considering how long the project was projected to take - roughly 2 days, one day for the laundry room and another for the bathroom. We had talked to other plumbers in our area and none were able to get working right away, so we decided the steep price tag was the price we ( well my parents) would have to pay for the project getting underway immediately.
Things did not go as planned, however. The laundry room took 2 days instead of 1 and when it was inspected it failed, so bringing the work up to code required another day's work. The bathroom ended up taking about 3 days to rough in. For us, this was not a problem; we were grateful to have the work done as soon as requested and the mistakes that had been made when the laundry room failed to be fixed right away.
For the owner of the plumbing company, however, this presented a problem. He now felt he was being underpaid for the job based on the price we had agreed on and without warning or discussion, charged us an addition $2500 on the last day of work, stating the job had taken longer than expected and had been "delayed."
The man apparently could not see reason. He felt we should be paying for the time his guys had to take to fix their own faulty work and for the fact that they worked half days two of the days they worked which made the job take longer(obviously). After an hour long discussion about it, Eric had to tell him we would discuss it further after the weekend. We couldn't see how this was possibly happening - we had signed a contract which he had asked us to sign. We signed it, he signed it and right there on the contract it stated that the cost of the job was fixed. No where on the contract was there anything about how long the project would take, it simply listed the tasks that would be completed for the amount listed.
Come Monday we received a call from the plumber's secretary about how we would be paying for the remainder of our balance plus the addition$2500. Eric told her we were still in negotiation about it and would call her back when we had reached a conclusion. Later that day I received a call from my dad telling me that an enormous charge had been made to his credit card, putting a hold on his card. He wanted to know if we had authorized the charge, which of course, we had not. Can you imagine this company, with out any consent, decided to charge the credit card which we had paid the deposit with?!
My dad put a stop payment on the card and I called the state licensing board because it was getting out of control. When speaking to the licensing board representative, not only was it illegal for a plumber to charge for work that didn't pass inspection, that they were not able to charge more for a job if a contract had already been entered into. These were things which common sense told me, but having the licensing board confirm it prepared us all the more for the next conversation we had with our plumber.
For an hour he tried to convince Eric we still owned him money and finally Eric had to tell him that we would not be paying it and if he perused it further we would not only take him to court, but we would report him to the licensing board and better business bureau. He stated he didn't want to go to court and that he would talk with his guys and be back in touch - we haven't heard from him.
Its sad that my parents gift of what should have been minimal time and hassle over this part of the project turned into something that caused us more frustration than it would had we just done it ourselves. We really are do it yourselfers at heart and I think this experience just further solidified that for the rest of the work that needs to be done to our house, we will be doing it ourselves.
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