I spoke with a delightful person named Jordan on the phone and explained the situation to her as described above and wanted to know if they could do it faster and what it would cost. I emailed her the pictures of the crack and of the entire plumbing infrastructure. She called me back a couple hours later and said they could not get to me today but they could do it on Monday morning but she could not give me a quote without seeing it. I understood that but asked if she could give me a ballpark price of what my worst case scenario would be based on the pictures (meaning tearing everything out and replacing it since you could see everything in the pictures). She put me on hold for a minute or two and came back and told me roughly $795.00 and that that was based on two guys for half a day (2 guys x 4 hours each). Well that seemed basically in line with what the other plumber had told me they were going to do and charge to replace it all and they could arrive Monday morning and I could leave by 1pm so I agreed hoping that when they saw it they could figure out a way to do it without replacing everything and was told they would make every effort to arrive by 8:30am but 9:00am for sure.
On Monday morning I received a call from Richardson plumbing saying they had an emergency and were running behind and could not be here at 9:00am but would get here as fast as they could. A little after 11:00am two plumbers arrived, I believe their names were Paul and Josh. One was a plumber and one was an apprentice, or so I've been told, and they were very courteous and friendly. I took them to the basement to show them the problem. After assessing the issue and some head scratching he said they could cap the vent from the bathroom vanity and bypass it, then cut the pipe here and here and splice in the pieces to fix it and it would not take very long. I said great, as long as works as it is supposed to and is cheaper that's great. He said he didn't have the parts on his truck and would go to Home Depot and buy them. They left to go to Home Depot. While they were gone I called and rescheduled my meetings since I had no expectations of being able to leave by 1pm.
At exactly 12:06pm they arrived back at my house with the parts. I let them into the basement and they went to work. I went back into my home office to do some work. At 12:50pm I was told they were finished and at 12:52pm they were out the front door. They did what he said, capped the vent from the vanity, spliced in the piece. It didn't leak and was very fast, I was thrilled.
The next day I get a call from Jordan again wanting to get payment, either by credit card or someone could come get a check. I said sure, how much is it. I have no idea since you only gave me an estimate of worst case scenario based on 2 guys for half a day and it turned out to be one guy working for 46 minutes, to be fair I cannot be sure the apprentice did absolutely nothing, I did see him carry the ladder and I did hear him flush the upstairs toilet while the other guy checked for leaks, but it couldn't possibly be anywhere close to that worst case scenario number you gave me. She seemed a little caught off guard by that statement (?) and said she would check with someone and call me back. A little while later she called me back and said Jay had agreed to take $100 off the original "quote". I told her that was ridiculous, there was no original quote, only a ballpark of what my "worst case scenario" was going to be and that was based off of 2 guys for half a day (8 man hours) and it turned out to only be one guy doing the work for 46 minutes. The scope of work assumed in the worst case scenario and the actual work performed in no way resembled the same thing. I said I needed to speak with Jay. She said he was out of the office but he would call me by the next morning.
Several hours later Jay did in fact call me. Unlike everyone else I had dealt with at Richardson Plumbing he was a rude jerk. He proceeded to tell me that he had given me a "FLAT RATE" estimate and it didn't matter if they were here for 15 minutes or 3 days he was not taking any more off the bill and some additional blah blah about he'd been doing this for 35 years. To be clear, there was NO OFFICIAL ESTIMATE GIVEN. This phone call occurred while I was in the middle of something of a social event, so a heated argument wasn't exactly possible. I said I would call Jordan the next day.
I would strongly recommend if you ever do business with Richardson Plumbing that you get a written estimate with a detailed scope of work and hold them to that scope of work. Or call someone else. And to be clear this is not a scope of work (exact verbiage from my invoice):
A-Cut out section of Piping and Fittings that were defective
B-Install Pipe and Fittings to complete project
No time on invoice, no parts, no itemization, nothing else at all except a ridiculous price. It might as well say "STOP LEAK". read more