I'm very upset. The main job was to re-grout & seal grout lines in our upstairs shower that had…read morestarted leaking. He also was here to fix a faucet handle in the downstairs bathroom and look at a shower temp control upstairs (same place the grout was being redone). He showed up on time, and I left him to his work. The downstairs handle was loosened up (it was getting hard to turn).
The grout... he said he was all done pretty quickly. The lines did appear to have been siliconed, and he'd used a power tool to clean them out. Fine. It was a messy job, but he said the silicone he'd gotten on the tiles would come right off. Not really. It took a razor blade, but fine. The price for the grout and the downstairs handle was $350. He was here less than an hour.
Now, the temp control. I told him I thought it's just a cartridge that gets replaced to fix the leak. He said no, he had to get into the wall, cut pipes, etc. He might be able to come in from behind and not tear up our tiles, but I should get needed parts, and he'd charge $1,100 for labor. Plus, he'd be tearing up a wall (and maybe shelves, depending upon exactly where he was going to cut the wall), and I'd have to get all of that repaired.
Fortunately, my spouse is smarter about this stuff than I am and didn't like the sound of any of this. So we looked around for a licensed plumber. It's not easy to find a good one, but fortunately we did. The plumber came in, checked it out, and told us to get a replacement cartridge for the temperature control. He said, no, of course he didn't need to tear up the wall--why would anyone do that? You just take the cartridge out and put in a new one, just as I thought. The plumber cost $175, and the job was done. A licensed plumber... just $175 versus the $1,100 and torn up walls I was quoted.
Then the plumber commented on the grout. "Did you do this?" I said no, we hired someone. "You PAID for that?" He wasn't saying that just because it was a sloppy job, which had bothered me. He said, "there's a bunch of mold that wasn't taken out. I can see it sticking out all over the edges of that silicone. You have to pull all of that out and redo it."
So that's what we've been doing today. We went to buy a grout removal tool, mold treatment, and the rest of what we needed. What should have been done! So we're re-doing the job we paid twice the plumber's bill to have done. And as we remove silicone, we can see that all of the grout hasn't even been replaced. It looks like he used his power tool, took out some grout and them siliconed over the whole thing. Not quality work at all. I'll attach some photos of this work we paid for.
UPDATE: I see that he has left a comment, not apologizing and instead denying what he did. There's no mistake here. This is the right business, the work was poorly done, and he was trying to hit me for unnecessary work at a steep price. Steer clear.
