Sign of Relief Plumbing Repairs

Hard to believe a relatively simple job could be botched so badly! After removing the old one-piece tub/surround, the plumbers installed waterproof wallboard which was apparently thinner than the other drywall in the room, so the new wall surrounding the tub is not flush with the wall above or beside it. The company owner was aware of the problem and even argued with the installer (his brother) over it, but did nothing to fix it. They simply tiled over it and when we complained that it looks terrible, they defended their work with the explanation that "the wall underneath is crooked." (Duh!) Our new tub came with a rubbery liner intended to protect it during installation, but the plumbers discarded it immediately, and proceeded to leave the tub filthy, splattered with dried grout and scratched and gouged where they apparently dropped tools in it. They assured me that they "had someone who could fix the gouge so I would never know it was there," but despite two follow-up phone calls from me, no one ever came to fix it. And the tub wasn't the only place they left a mess. Dried grout was everywhere: smeared on the the wall, the vanity sink, the hall carpet, and 3 inches up one door jamb. (I spent hours scraping it off carefully, often using my fingernails to avoid damaging the underlying surfaces.) They'd installed wall tiles with chipped corners, despite having plenty of extras. One baseboard was tacked down on a diagonal, fully two inches off the floor at the highest point. (Why would anybody do THAT?) Two tiles in the floor cracked across within a week, and they came back to replace them, but tiles all over the floor have continued to crack. The bathroom is only 5' x 7' and in that tiny floor space, ten of the tiles are cracked across and the dark surface is chipping away, exposing the white interior. I'm not going to rip up the floor to find out, but I strongly suspect that they did not install the rigid substrate needed to support tile, even though I had discussed it with the plumber and was assured that he would do so. So why didn't I raise a ruckus and demand that they fix things? Because the plumbers did one thing right: protected themselves. When they finished up, they warned us not to go in the bathroom because they had just grouted the floor. Then they asked my husband to sign a "completion form" with fine print stating that "the work was finished to my satisfaction," even though we hadn't yet been able to take a close look. Nevertheless, we did ask for, and got, two callbacks to fix the most immediate and egregious problems: the first to augment grout that sank and pulled away from the floor tiles, and another to replace two cracked tiles and reset the diagonal baseboard. I give them credit for that. But the larger underlying problems remain unaddressed, partly because of the form my husband signed, and partly because I really don't want these guys to ever enter my house again.