If you know me, you know a few things about me:
1. I am my mother’s daughter in many ways (especially with money).
2. I love supporting small businesses….when they deserve it.
3. I believe in hard work and being fair.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way let me give you the story. We wanted to start doing some renovation/updating projects around the house. A lot of them we are tackling ourselves. But some of them are out of our realm of expertise so we asked for recommendations for people to help with those projects. For the most part we’ve had some great people- a landscaper who pruned back a lot of our front bushes, two different plumbers who installed our kitchen sink and fixed a water pressure issue. But we’ve had quite a time finding someone to renovate our bathroom. So when a friend recommended her son, who has his own handyman business, we thought it was a great idea. My first clue that it may not have been a good match for us is when he was over 2 hours late to give us a quote. But, when he did show up, he gave us a very reasonable quote for several jobs and said it would only take a couple days to tear out our bathroom floor and replace it with tile. *sigh* It didn’t happen that way….at all. He was very unreliable and it became clear pretty early on that he wasn’t the expert I thought he was. I’m not going into too much detail about all the chaos that led to a less than stellar job. But I will tell you that I’m always conscientious about money. This time it wasn't necessarily about the money. It was more about the fact that we got suckered into paying WAY more than we would have for a licensed contractor. AND the guy was paid in full before the job was completed to my satisfaction so our bathroom will not be something I love for the time being. He ruined the door frames and the paint job that I spent hours on. On the flip side, we are going to completely remodel the bathroom at some point. So we will hire a licensed contractor who has experience and hopefully he will fix these flooring issues when that happens. And, on the bright side, Rob and I will basically be the only ones who will see it. So, lessons learned for the future- business with friends isn’t always the best choice, don’t always hire the most reasonably priced quote, don’t pay for the job until it is complete and plan on it taking longer than planned. *sigh* Our new bathroom….
During…..
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