Bill Flanagan Plumbing

We hired Bill from a reference of a friend of ours, his wife, as he was looking for some work. From the begining he informed us that he was working on the ski hill and would be available to work two or three times a week on his days off. We agreed that we could work with that if he worked full days, which he said he should be able to do. From the begining he did not work a full day. At best he put in, from what we were billed for, 4 of 4.5 hours. Each day we would come home we immediatly were disappointed about the amount of work that was actually completed. We had a hard time determining if he just was not showing up or showing up and just not getting any thing done. It took four weeks for him to do the work he completed that shuold have taken three full day of work at most.

During these four weeks, we had numerous problems;

            One day when we arrived home after work (he was already gone for the day) we could see that he was plumbing for two sinks when I had told him numerous times there was only one sink plus I had drawn a diagram on the wall of the layout for the vanity and sink from our first meeting.

            He set the tub over 1 inch off center, even though I specifically  went over with him on the placement of the fixture.

            A week after the tub was set, I noticed that the tub moved. It rocked to and from the back wall up to about 3/8" movement. I called Bill immediatley and had him come that night and look at the movement. He stood ther and looked me in the eye and stated that "...the tub is suppose to move." I knew this was wrong and argued that it was not set correctly by him. He wanted to bring in another person to look at it and determine for him if he was or was not right that the tub should move. I was tired of his delays and told him I would give him 24 hours to  bring someone in. The next night he called and said he did not have time nor found anyone who would come and look and determine the position of his arguement. I told him that in the same 24 hours, I talked to three contractors, another plumber, a tile setter who would be setting the tile around the tub and the plumbing supply house where we purchased the tub and all of them told me that " A tub should not move once it is set, period." 

The problems continued:

When he sent us his first invoice, we were shocked. He was billing us for 28.5 hours and still not completed with the task. We could not figure out what he wasdoing with his time, the same time he was billing us for. Example: His first day at our project, he told us he did not get that much done. He removed the old toilet collar, and drilled the hole for the new toilet collar and then placed the pipe he needed into the crawl space (only about four 10 foot pieces. For this he charged us for 3.5 hours! Just about every day we would come home and be stuned by how little was being done. I immediatly called him when I received his bill and told him that I dont mind paying $65.00 an hour if we were getting $65.00 worth of work in those hours. His response was to tell me he was not even done billing us for the hours "he worked". We came to and agreement for a less than billed figure and told him we would find someone else to complete the project. 

We ended up finding a new plumber who completed our project on time and with hours billed to us that were more in line to work completed. The tub had to be removed and reset which required the removal of dry wall and three hours of labor paid to complet the tub reset and drywall repair which we never did get reimburst from Bill.

There are plenty of capable and quality plumbers out in this economy who are looking for work that I wish we would have called sooner to help with our project.