This company renovated two bathrooms and hooked up our brand new kitchen 2-1/2 years ago. I am a…read morelicensed contractor and had to foster new relationships with vendors because I was 4 hours away. The tech was mildy experienced and hooked up may items incorrectly which we had fixed at our own expense. The most recent being the master bath shower pan that was not done to code for two reasons. The first reason was there were no dam corners above the curb as required by the Florida building code. Dam corners are put in so if there is ever a leak where the shower enclosure penetrations are, everything stays protected. This is evidenced in the 2023 Florida building code chapter 27. They really need to educate themselves.
Also, this pan should've been pre-pitched with either a Styrofoam liner or with floor mud before the pan was put down. This is Florida building code and is the way that I do it in my business every day. Placing a shower pan directly against raw concrete without a proper slope, almost certainly leads to a pan failure. Water will pool beneath or inside the pan, rotting the surrounding structure, fostering mold, and compromising the waterproof seal which is exactly what happened.
I paid them to do this correctly and I had assumed that it would be in accordance with the Florida building code. I was not living there and was not able to be there to supervise.
When I contacted them, Luis argued with me and told me that it was done correctly, the same way he did when he hooked up our Alkaline Water machine where it was reversed, and the Alkaline Water was coming out of the small spout where you couldn't even fit a cup under. He actually called me "picky." I have never, in my 37 years, doing kitchen and bathroom remodels, called a client picky for wanting something to work as designed and intended.
I requested a refund on what was paid orginally (not the amount to rip everything out, pay for a proper pan to be done, and re-tile. That cost will be over $10,000.00. Their response is as listed below:
Thank you for reaching out to us. We have received your request for a refund regarding the shower pan installation completed at your Tampa condo in December 2023.
As a General Contractor and fellow industry professional, I believe you can appreciate the operational standards necessary to maintain the integrity of a specialized trade like plumbing. Because of our respect for your professional background, we want to address your concerns with complete transparency.
Our standard service warranty on labor is one year from the date of completion. As this project was completed over two and a half years ago, it is well outside our established warranty window. More importantly, our records and your recent correspondence indicate that another contractor has already opened and manipulated the work area to perform their own diagnosis and remediation.
From a protective and liability standpoint, it is impossible for us to honor or evaluate a warranty claim once another party has touched the work. In our industry, it is unfortunately common for a competitor to attempt to discredit previous work to justify their own scopes. Because we were not given the opportunity to inspect the issue first-hand in its original state, we cannot verify the conclusions drawn by a third party.
That being said, we truly value the long-standing relationship we've built with you. Because you are a VIP customer, we are willing to offer a professional courtesy that reflects that status. While we cannot issue a refund for work that was accepted and remained functional for over two years, we would be happy to send a senior technician to look at the issue and suggest a root-cause fix. Should you choose to have us perform the corrective work, we will apply a heavily discounted "VIP rate" to the labor and materials, just as we have done in the past.
We value your business and hope to resolve this in a way that respects both our warranty policies and your history with Premium Plumbing.
This response is a joke. The pan was leaking into the unit below and caused over $1000.00 damage to their unit which I also had to pay. As a contractor, I fully realize things can go wrong. It's how a company rectifies those mistakes that sets them apart.
