$300 Faucet installation: Did I pay too much?
Rick, good perspective, thanks. It was indeed a small job, and he came from Bay Ridge.
ronvalron
in Handymen and Odd Jobs 13 years and 7 months ago
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ronvalron | 13 years and 7 months ago
Was just charged $300 to put a new faucet in. Standard one-hole sink; garbage disposal made it a little hard to maneuver but not that hard. Took the guy 45 minutes. I knew the fee ahead of time, so this is on me – though it wasn’t quoted until he got there in person, even though he knew what the job would entail when I first called him on the phone. What has this cost for you? Fwiw, the guy was a plumber, though he advertises himself as a handyman too. I chose to pay it, so it’s hard to call it a ripoff. But I wonder if the quote would have been different if I lived in a different building/apartment.
levicapland | 13 years and 7 months ago
Yes. You paid him over $6 an minute to do something a handy man would have done for $50. Now What? Levi Capland
SoHo Appliances
dylanfan | 13 years and 7 months ago
Yeah, this is what my mother used to call getting held up without a gun. Next time ask for a rec on this site before you go ahead.
Master Plvmber | 13 years and 7 months ago
Is he a licensed plumber?
starfish11040 | 13 years and 7 months ago
Your mistake was that you hired a plumber (I assume you mean a licensed plumber – if not then you were ripped off even more than you think) to do what a handyman could have done at a fraction of that cost.
ronvalron | 13 years and 7 months ago
Thanks – he advertises himself as a handyman but is also an experienced plumber. Even so, I was curious as to whether a plumber would have charged that much (if only to make myself feel a little bit better). Anyway, more in the separate post.
jockdeboeraia | 13 years and 7 months ago
This is the problem of getting a price without seeing the job. He padded it to make sure he did not get jammed with some unforeseen problem. Most will charge a min. fee just to show up anyway.
ronvalron | 13 years and 7 months ago
Actually, maybe I’m not being clear. I told him the nature of the job on the phone. He did not quote me a price on the phone. But his Web site says $125 an hour, flat rate. I had no reason to believe that wouldn’t apply to plumbing, since the Web site didn’t say it didn’t and he didn’t say it didn’t on the phone. He does say on the phone that it’s $40 for him to show up, refundable if he ends up doing the work. He shows up, sees what he needs to do and probably knows about how long it will take. He quotes me $300\. I blanch. I ask how long it will take. He hems and haws and won’t say. I start calculating the $40 down the drain if I tell him to scram, another day lost to chasing flakey handymen and hours spent trying to find somebody and I cave, which 8 out of 10 people probably do too. He knows that and has worked that into his equation presumably. Then he tells me that the minimum for faucet installation is always $300\. So why isn’t that on the Web site? He didn’t have a real good answer for that. “Maybe it should be,” he said. Um, yeah. But maybe if it was on the site, I never would have called. In fact, I know I wouldn’t have called.
ronvalron | 13 years and 7 months ago
By the way, the work seems good. But that isn’t really the point.
Rick | 13 years and 7 months ago
Okay, here’s my two cents, it’s just my opinon and I had nothing to do with this job. You could have had a handyman do this for under $100\. ( but who knows what hassels that may have been). You could have fixed it yourself with a little research. However, you got an experenced person that fixed your problem in under an hour. His fee sounds like a minimum charge for a professional. Who ever did this work has overhead expense plus he had to spend a great deal of time just to find a parking space in Park Slope. I think it’s best to look at the big picture. Often the expense is related to what a contractor feels it’s worth to bother with a small job.