About a month ago I fired my contractor, and found a new one.

As you may recall last year I had some work done on my duplex in Clendenin. I had about a third of the driveway replaced, had the trashed unit in the duplex cleaned out and gutted, and also had the plumbing fixed (as of late November, I had running water).  All this work was done by one contractor, but after he bungled the plumbing I decided to find a new one.

The plumbing in that house was in an iffy state. Well, actually it was shit in many ways, and needed to be ripped out wholesale. The plumbing in the crawl space looked like a rat’s nest, and one of the two supply lines was shot, but the good news was that the other supply line was still in good condition, so I had the contractor replumb the bathroom and kitchen sink.

It cost about a thousand dollars, which was worth it because I had running water (including hot water). The work the contractor did was very good, but the work he didn’t do ended up being a huge problem.

You see, my old contractor neglected to do anything to keep the supply line in the crawl space from freezing. It’s a pretty standard thing to add something called heat tape  to a supply line. This is basically a heating cable which gets taped to a pipe in order to keep the water in the pipe from freezing in the middle of winter and bursting the pipe.

My old contractor didn’t do that, and as a result my supply line burst during the first deep freeze in January. And since I was too busy to get to Clendenin that month, the busted pipe was leaking water for a good 3 weeks before the water company noticed.

According to my bill, 107,700 gallons of water was wasted. This resulted in a $1,500 water bill, and a $1,000 sewer bill (the water company was not the same as the sewer company).

I’m still trying to get the water company to waive the bill, and I will let you know how that goes.

To add insult to injury, when I asked my old contractor to fix the leak, I told him to add a heat tape so we can make sure this didn’t happen again. He did not, and that’s when I decided he had to go. (I did attach the heat tape, yes.)

TBF, I think I deserve about 25% of the blame here. I grew up in Kansas and thanks to its really cold winters already knew about heat tape, but I didn’t bug my contractor about it because I figured he would put it in if it was a good idea. I also didn’t want to annoy him, and that was a mistake – quite the expensive one, in fact.

So I found a new contractor. I hired him to replace the roof (it was leaking in at least 5 spots that I know of). It looked like the work was well done, and the quote was in the ballpark for  a roof that size (I even got a partial refund on materials, which was nice).

Oh, that reminds me. When I first started reaching out to contractors last spring, I had a dickens of a time getting anyone to answer my emails. At first I was really pissed by their unprofessional behavior, but then one told me that the signature on my emails looked scammy. I had honestly never heard that before, but it would explain how much trouble I had hiring contractors last spring.

My new contractor is actually one of the guys who ghosted me last spring. I happened to get a notification that he had re-opened my email right about the time I started looking for a replacement, so I reached out, explained about my mistake last year, and set up an appointment.

He seems to do good work, so as soon as I get the money I will have him first fix the floors, and then start remodeling the trashed unit.