Ohhhh, THIS is a good story, boys and girls.
Bob the Plumber and Dave the Guy Who Knows What He's Talking About came to the house about two weeks ago to look at the ceiling. (For the uninitiated and those who don't want to read back: My kitchen ceiling, also known as the floor of the bathroom directly above, has a slope of about 3 degrees south-southeast. This is because the howling fuckwit, the individual who "rehabbed" the house and sold it to me, left all the structural problems and covered them with fresh sheets of drywall and a new coat of paint, and called it a "rehab." The main structural defect thus ignored was one of the main joists, the one that runs under the end of the bathtub; the old toilet, previously stationed right above this joist, had a slow leak and caused the entire east end of the joist to rot away. This--as you might imagine--is never a good thing. The entire floor has dropped a good 4" at that end, and the floor above can't be levelled til the situation is resolved.)
Anyway. Bob and Dave said "yeah, we can do this, let us talk about this and get back to you tomorrow." (Again for the uninitiated: "Tomorrow" is the only day on Bob's calendar. It can mean anything from "next week" til "three months from Wednesday"; the only thing it does NOT mean is "a period of time within the next 24 hours.") So, after the obligatory fourteen days of "no, we haven't had a chance to talk about it yet, but I'll get with him and I'll call you back tomorrow"s, on Friday, I called him from work.
Here's the gist of it: Oh, Dave will fix my joist all right--for $1200-1400.
Okay, I say. Since I've already paid you $3900, and you haven't come near doing $3900 of work, we can just re-allocate that, and we'll have to leave some of the other stuff out.
"Well, see, I can't do that," Bob tells me. "And I knew you were gonna ask me that, but I just can't do that."
"Why, exactly, is that?" I ask, already knowing why. At this point, small red spots have started floating in my vision.
He starts babbling about "Jim screwed me over" (Jim is his former partner) and "I'm not responsible for the structure problems in your house" and "once you get the structure fixed, I'll do the rest of the work you paid for."
I say "But I can't GET the structure fixed, because I don't have $1200 to pay, because I'm paying on the loan I took to pay you FOUR MONTHS AGO."
He goes on, more of the same, and I am so enraged that I have to get off the phone. I tell him "I am not happy about this, and I have to go think about how I want to handle it, so I will call you back."
I go home and talk to LJ, who has been telling me for about three months that I need to take this guy to court because we're living in a construction zone and this guy is dicking us around with his "tomorrow"'s. I've wanted to avoid that--I understand that people have emergencies--but now I find that LJ was RIGHT, and I get to admit that, eat crow, and feel like an asshole. (To his credit, LJ--although he said something along the Axis Of I-Told-You-So, also said he hadn't wanted to rub it in so he didn't say as much as he wanted to while it was all going on. It wasn't that he was right that pissed me off, anyway--it was that I was wrong!)
After talking to LJ, I did a little note-taking about what all had happened. (I think best on paper; in fact, one of the great quotes of my college years was spoken by my best friend T, upon seeing my Notes On A Fight With My Boyfriend: "This is GREAT! You're mad in outline form!!") And I came up with three options:
1. Bob makes some arrangements with Dave to pay him for the work he does, and that's deducted from the amount I've already paid; then once Dave's work is done, the balance of that money is applied to whatever needs to be done, til it's gone; or
2. Bob pays me back the $3900, minus the cost of the work he's already done--the chimney liner, the soil pipe, and the bathtub (but not the shitty tile job, and not the "work" Bob's son did, which will have to be un-done for the joist to be fixed)--and we call it quits; or
3. This goes to court.
So I called Bob on Saturday to give him this information.
This, should you wonder, represents an absolute pole-vault into the Asshole Hall of Fame. His salient points were as follows:
a) he "didn't know the floor was sloped so bad." (BULLSHIT. He had WORKED on that floor; he had WALKED on that floor; and two of his employees--both Jim and Jay--had attempted to FIX that floor. Not only that, but the bad joist has been exposed since BEFORE he took over that job from the previous contractors. If he "didn't know" something, it's because either he didn't WANT to know, or he was not told by his employees--which means he had no business offering to fix it if he didn't have all the information.)
b) He is "not responsible for paying for fixing the structure" of my house. According to him, the person I SHOULD be mad at is the guy who sold me the house. (I don't disagree with EITHER of those points. The point is, he has been paid $3900 and not done $3900 worth of work. If he can't complete the work because of the condition of the house, then he owes me that money.)
"But why did you pay him in advance, anyway?" (Yes, I heard all of you out there saying that. And I can see you all, too--you've got something on your nose, by the way. Eeww.)
Here's the deal: When they told me what all the work would cost, I went and took out a loan and had my mom cosign. They told me they would roll the cost of my water heater--the first thing I'd called them for--into the loan, and that I'd have about $650 left over because of that. Once I got the loan proceeds, I paid him in advance-- because he told me that they (he and Jim) couldn't complete the job unless I gave them money for the materials. And of course, NORMALLY they would be able to buy their own materials, but see, there was this guy they did a job for? And he stiffed them on a $5000 check, and it bounced, and they can't seem to track him down to get the money. So they really NEEDED me to give them the rest of the money (I had already paid them a good amount, trusting that the work they had done was sufficient to cover what I was paying) so they could finish the job. In fact, when I told them I didn't have the money (because they'd told me I'd have $650 left, I'd paid some extra bills), Bob got really pissed at me and told me they needed that money or they wouldn't be able to do any more work. So I borrowed MORE money, this time from my mom, and paid them the extra.
That was when their partnership fell apart. I should have known right then and there that I was about to get screwed. But Bob assured me that he could do all the work, if I would just be patient with him...
My patience has come to a crashing, screeching halt.
Anyway, Saturday's conversation did not go well--he talked over me, his voice was raised, and it ended when I told him "If you can't do the work, you need to pay me the money for the work you haven't done." He told me "Once you get your structure fixed, I'll do every penny of work, but I'm not going to pay for the structure of your house." I told him I don't expect him to, but since the structure can't be fixed right now, since I don't have the money to do it, he needs to pay me back the money I've already paid for the work he's not going to be able to do. At that point HE told ME he was ending the conversation and "taking a time-out", and he would call me back. He hasn't called back yet, and the more I think about it, the more I think I'm just going to go ahead and take him to court regardless. His work habits and work ethic does not instill a great confidence in me.
The lesson for today, boys and girls: DON'T EVER deal with contractors unless they have sufficient cash-flow to buy materials for the job without being paid. DON'T EVER pay anyone in advance for ANYTHING.
What an outrageous clusterfuck this has become.
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