I talk to much
[Originally published May 5, 2006
We had a plumber come by yesterday. I had put in a request to ServiceMagic about needing the fixtures in our guest bath changed out. The knobs were leaky and the shower diverter was jammed. We went to Home Depot the day before and bought the only two handle kit they had. Looked ok, but the display in Home Depot is deceptive. I can get to that later.
One of my co-workers had mentioned Service Magic to me. They’re basically like a Lending Tree but for professional services. So I put in the request and a couple of people had contacted me to setup appointments. One group gave me a quote of $205 for the job. The guy who showed up yesterday came in looked at the job and said that it would cost $493, but gave me a 10% discount.
At this moment, I actually said to him “Wow that’s a lot more than what we had expected. Another guy quoted us $205, but I thought that was a little low.” I actually told the guy standing in front of me that I thought $205 was low! I didn’t think about this earlier but Sarah mentioned to me. Why in the world did I do that? Sarah says I’m just too nice and tend to try and make everyone feel better. Good thing I don’t do contract negotiations on a big scale.
We decided to have the guy do the job, which ended up taking 3 hours. It took awhile just to make an access panel to change out the equipment. The handles we got are not the knob style. So when they had them at Home Depot the handles were each point out, parallel to the floor pointing away from the faucet. Turns out, you can position them that way, but the handles have to both turn counter clockwise, so they look really funny when you use them. Grrr……So for now they’re both pointing down and turn to the right so at least it’s symmetrical.
On a side note, Homefix skipped out on their appointment yesterday to put in the last door and finish the rest of the work. This is really getting to be more of a headache than we had planned.