Switching Plumbers

This is the peril of the NYC renovation system, which drastically favors trades and plumber in particular over homeowners. I wish there was a more equitable solution.

Note that I do understand that tons of trades gets screwed over by homeowners as well, probably often.

However at least trades have the option of filing a mechanics lien on unpaid work, which is powerful (and they can mess with you with a lien even if you are paid up). For owners? You literally have no option other than court, that I know of. The whole “withhold the last 10%” of payment” is meaningless, and there’s currently no great way to vet trades other than word of mouth and even that fails—Angie’s list is no good in NY, Better Business Bureau is pointless, Dept of Consumer Affairs helps with regards to contractors but doesn’t touch plumbers, and it moves slowly and is time-consuming (though it worked for us).

I’d love to hear from trades what they think would be a fair system.

Personal rant: For our reno we had 4 plumbers to do work here, one avoided calls for weeks to start the job, no-showed a handful of times, finally showed with a crew one fine morning to a locked house then flipped out and quit the job on day one—he had a sterling reputation. The next plumber turned out to be a hack covered by a master plumber who was getting paid out (I didn’t know that–he was hired by GC, and we only learned that after he had done 50% of the work) and he disappeared with a load of cash, the job 75% done, and he did sloppy often wrong work—crossed hot/cold lines, gas line wrong, etc. The covering MP said he’d finish the job out but has refused to call back and call for inspection. And the other master plumber for boiler install was a bumbling fool, very experienced for 30 years and recommended by a top-notch boiler company, but constantly missing details and messing up, took a year to finally get things working on a new install. He didn’t quite finish the job and is now asking for a couple grand to renew the permit and close it out.
I did my best to research all these people and found nothing in advance (the boiler guy was flagged on this site—I’ll name him after we close our permit) indicating they might be bad.
Perhaps we were the bad link in the process? Maybe, but we were crystal clear on teh scope of the work, were responsive to questions, paid the day we were asked, paid extra for overruns, did everything asked of us, and still got screwed.

So, for trades who wonder why plumbers get a bad rep–educate us homeowners. How does one get a fair shake dealing with you, and not taken to the cleaners? I admire the hard dirty work plumbers do, truly, but feel like they are literally unaccountable to anyone—show up late, fuck off if they feel like it, charge the top price of any trade, and there’s zero recourse for consumers who might be left literally high and dry.

Lurker

in General Discussion 9 years and 7 months ago

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rheawong | 9 years and 7 months ago

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Has anyone had any experience switching plumbers on an open job? We’ve let go of our lazy plumber after growing tired of begging him to complete work on a very straightforward alt-2 townhouse reno. Work that’s 95% complete and paid for, no less – it just seems easier to close out the job with someone else. A notarized supersede letter to the DOB is required of the new plumber to assume responsibility for the job, but am I missing anything else? Any recommendations out there?

ellenlourie | 9 years and 7 months ago

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Why would any plumber take responsibility for someone else’s job when job is 95% done?

eman134 | 9 years and 7 months ago

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as gennady said, any plumber who would take over the job is going to charge far more than what you consider the balance of the job is worth…they have no idea of the quality of work that has been done and may demand that walls are opened to examine the work that has been done, You are looking at an absolute minimum of $5000 on a sunny day,plus the value of any work needed to complete the job(probably closer to 15% of the contract price)
,… since you are asking a plumber to put his lisence at risk for what may be substandard work. Would you expect a lawyer to sign off documents written up by someone else?