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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3019 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 10, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I want to bitch about the blue collar middle class here for a second: Contractors are all liars and thieves, or thieves and liars.

Was doing some maintenance on one of our properties, in this case a leaking water line near a wall from god knows when; but was on the plans and part of the original construction. Fuckers ran that shit 100 feet through a slab and instead of spending an extra 50 bucks on fittings and labor to put a t to a hose bib for hose bib and draining purposes; they did four pipe bends to bring the whole fucking thing into the air, ran it into the wall, then back into the fucking slab. Turned a 30 min. solder job into a 8 hour hell march (admittedly because I didn't restock on slip to street couplings and wide radius 90s. Oh well) because I can't just tell the resident "lol i cut the water pipe no water till the grainger truck arives lol".

This a couple days after I went to replace a failing range hood to find it was venting through dryer vent (NOT TO CODE BIG FIRE HAZARD HOURS) and the dryer vent was venting into a cavity in the ceiling, and was actually not even connected to the range hood that had never had the plug removed so it wasn't venting at all.

I go to fix this, and find that the complete shitbags that did previous owners kitchen remodel installed a 3 layers of drywall and a 2*4 below the galvanized vent pipe that goes to the roof. These motherfuckers turned a 30 min. job into me having to cut a 2 foot access hole into the fucking kitchen ceiling because they also ran a ton of vents to a gas heater 100% blocking the crawl space; all in service of scamming their customer out of thousand(s) of dollar(s) and maybe burning their house down.

All this to say: Never trust a contractor. Never trust a tradesman older than 36 but younger than 68. I've never worked with one in that range that didn't try to cut corners or steal from their customers on the quote end.

If a contractor fuck you over, is there any recourse?

I wouldn't mind paying extra if they do a good job, but if do a horrible job and overcharge you then that's pretty much a scam isn't it?

I think of IT support, where people willingly fork over hundreds for a repair that could've taken a 15 minute google search. People pay for ignorance, or just convenience. Why charge $10 for 15 minute of work, if people willingly pay $50 or $100?

I make enough now that I'd rather pay for a contractor than do something myself especially if it needs a ton of manual labor, but I haven't had much experience with contractors. I'll take your experience as a cautionary tale.

If a contractor fuck you over, is there any recourse?

I am not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice.

It's very difficult to bring serious punishment to a contractor. There are exceptions -- if someone just doesn't do anything, or completely destroys an area, or literally seriously injures or kills someone -- you can sometimes get criminal charges or a contractor's license revoked, but there's a big emphasis on 'sometimes', here. Merely shoddy or below-code work will almost never hit that bar.

Meanwhile, refusing to pay for contracted work that was partially- or incompetently-completed work will almost always result in a construction lien against your property. It's possible to clear this up in court if the work is clearly incomplete or dangerous, but if it's merely incompetent this can be much more complicated and dependent on the whims of a judge, and while active will prevent most loans using or sales of the property.

Mediation is usually the first recourse, if the problem is merely scale rather than scam. If the fault is just doing a bad job for the price, but all the rough parts are kinda in place if you squint, you'll often have no recourse but to badmouth the contractor. Assuming scam...

At least in the United States (and Canada) your main option is court. Below a certain (state-specific) threshold, that will be in small claims court -- good in the sense that it's not very expensive (or slow) to bring suit, bad in the sense that you'll have very limited recourse and if you win will almost always get a (capped) compensatory damages. Having clear contractual obligations (don't just write "follow code": mandate materials and specific tasks) and documenting the full scope of both the damages and before the work can make it easier to win; longer delays before filing suit or having work where it's difficult to find an expert to document problems will be harder (or, worse, if you let a contractor tell you that it 'won't need a permit or inspections' and you believed them). Larger (>5k-10k USD, though again this varies by state) stuff will have to go to conventional civil courts and is almost always going to need lawyers involved to some extent.

Note that just winning in court and demonstrating the damages to the court doesn't necessarily mean you'll get your cash back: a lot of scuzzier contractors are fly-by-night operations that can be extremely difficult to recover damages from, either being conventionally judgement proof by not having a lot of recoverable assets, or by just being too obnoxious to recover them.

The typical advice is prevention. You can't avoid every scammer, but a lot of them have a number of red flags. Most reputable contractors for major projects will have past projects they can point you toward as references, will have enough capital that you can contract most payment to occur after major milestones or project completion, and will not try to skimp on permitting and inspections, because that's how you become a reputable contractor. Most scammy contractors won't put off payment and accept specific contractual requirements that they can't meet, because that's the fastest way for a scammer to not get paid and the contractor's lien to get thrown out. If you get multiple estimates, someone offering an order-of-magnitude lower prices than the average without offering a different scope of work is probably not gonna be able to get the job done.

But those won't help if the contractor just plain lies, or if the inspectors are morons or felons/demented, or if a scammer has hollowed out a once-reputable company or the 'reputable company' was really just a gateway to a roulette of sometimes-reputable subcontractors.

The best prevention has to involve using your own evaluation, whether that be to check yourself or to evaluate specific experts, and to do so throughout the process.

The best recourse you can have is social (not professional) reputation in the community.

I'm not a Jehovah's Witness, but a lot of my cousins are big at the local kingdom hall. I've used a lot of JWs they recommended for small jobs, because they won't screw me too bad, knowing that if they screw me my cousins will hear about it, and it'll become gossip among JWs.

Don't get me wrong, they'll still scrimp on stuff they think you won't notice, or do totally unaccountably dumb stuff like pour extra paint down the drain, but they generally won't steal or fail to perform.

My biggest problem with contractors lately has been that I've had so many plates spinning, that I have this perpetual problem of leaving them alone for too long, and they "helpfully" decide to build the whole thing out of popsicle sticks and old plywood. When if they had just called me, I would have gotten the proper material and had them do it right.

Honestly, if a contractor charges you 10* market rate but does a good job, I would just consider that capitalism at work. Yes, it is probably morally wrong and pretty scammy; but what isn't?

The problem (as you noticed) is that price is decoupled from quality.

Re. consequences: No, not really. You should only use licenced and bonded contractors and get everything in writing; specially for important shit. (If you get a guy from the HD parking lot to lay some carpet, the worst that happens is you need to relay the carpet. Less so in the case of eg. roof maintenance.)

If you get everything in writing (Dates and Rates+ specified materials at specified prices, etc) and they fuck you on one of them, you can usually recover something in small claims court or get them to redo the work because they know you can get them in court.

If you don't have it in writing? hahahaha get fucked kid.

The real issue is that lots of shitty contracting only becomes apparent 3 years later when the boomer fuck who had the license is dead or cirrhotic or fucking coolie boys in Malaysia

If a contractor fuck you over, is there any recourse?

Not paying them and seeing who has better underworld-adjacent friends.

I had three different HVAC repair men come to look at my furnace and all three gave me completely different diagnoses with very similar prices (~$1300). My aunt has a list of repair men that she has collected over her life (mostly recommended by friends I think) and is adamant that word-of-mouth recommendations are the only feasible way to get a good contractor.

I found one company that seems pretty good in my area. They have electricians, plumbers, and indoor air specialists.

One of the things that made me a little more confident was how frustrated they were with the state of the house and how reluctant they were to do more expensive fixes.

There also seems to be two layers of protection in place:

  1. The local government comes out and inspects work related to plumbing, electrical, and gas. The professional might not care too much about their reputation with me, but they need the inspector to like them.
  2. They fix things that they messed up on. So one pro doing a bad job and screwing it up for a different professional gets noticed.

Amen to that. Liars and thieves. I can accept that when the final result is fine. We once hired our late neighbor to renovate our dacha and his people did a good job (not perfect, but good enough), but we paid through the nose for top-of-the-line materials and the end result was unmaintainable. I have no idea where any of the power lines and water lines go. I wanted to install a bigger breaker and couldn't, because the line that goes from the pole to the breaker passes through the house like the recurrent laryngeal nerve through a giraffe, I can't run a new thicker cable through the same conduit because there's no conduit, I would have to open up the walls and reroute everything.

Everyone else I've hired has been even worse. For construction my only answer is, "hire a company, include independent inspection in the contract, hire an independent technical inspector". For piping and wiring and the rest being your own general contractor is the only option.

We've bought an aging manufactured home, and are trying to figure what maintenance we should do. Unfortunately, if I, as a naive person who doesn't know that much yet, try searching for information online, I just get a bunch of contractor sites telling us to hire them to do work that won't result in a clear end state that we'd be in a position to evaluate. Things like "re-level" it every three years or something (there wouldn't be much evidence whether this had been done properly or not). The only thing I've found that's clearly measurable by me at this point is "wait for the house to fall apart in some obvious way, replace it with an entirely new structure."

Are there good sources of information to help a homeowner figure out what to even hire someone to do, and how to tell if they did in fact do a good job of it?

I have been reading through the international building code which my local city and county defer to, with amendments.

try searching for information online, Ask ChatGPT.

I’ll give it a try, though the anecdote above about it staunchly insisting the ISS is larger than the moon wasn’t reassuring.

Adding: I did try asking Chat GPT, and it gave a bit of advice, but mostly recommends finding and evaluating a structural engineer. I suppose I could ask either the organization we bought it though (a local non-profit who are still holding the mortgage, and therefore invested in it retaining value) or some friends who are doing contractor and handyman work.

Man, don't ask chat GPT. Doesn't know dick about shit. Try getting it to say anything deeper than buzzfeed for your area of expertise for a laugh.

Speaking of not knowing dick, mobile homes are a closed book to me. I assume you are in a community of such; if they have a managment office they'll probably know. Failing that, probably normal house shit needs done in addition to mobile home shit.

EG, check your roof, check your door sweeps and insulation, change the anode in your water heater if it's gone, clean the filters in your range hood and furnace, flush your water heater, etc.

Haha.

I assume you are in a community of such; if they have a managment office they'll probably know

No, this is just how they do semi-rural houses out here. We have it because the land it's on is very nice for a variety of reasons, and the house itself is... a house, which provides shelter, and is large enough. It has a metal roof, which is nice.

change the anode in your water heater if it's gone, clean the filters in your range hood and furnace, flush your water heater, etc.

I'll look into this, thanks. I hadn't heard of an anode before, and had to look it up. We do have very hard water -- mountain spring water, so at least it's nice to drink, but is pretty hard on appliances.

How do you find trustworthy contractors?

You can't. They don't exist. They are like unicorns. You can do 100 jobs with a contractor, and that won't stop them from fucking you on the 101st. Ask me how I know!

For real though: don't trust reviews, and try to either get a personal friend who is a contractor to do it or have the personal friend contractor find you one that he knows to not be a total shit.

For Real For Real: Become your own contractor. Hire tradespeople directly, let them know before they quote you will get the materials they recommend yourself and keep any spares, only pay the full amount on completion, and stand over their shoulders the whole fucking time they are working.

For the REALEST: do what I did and become and omnitradsman, capable of doing everything except sparky shit on your own to a semi-expert level and then suffer eternaly.

get a personal friend who is a contractor to do it

A contractor who is a personal friend or a relative is the worst option, IMO. You won't be able to call them out if they do something wrong because you don't want to sour your relationship.

Yeah, there's a lot of space for horror stories here: the contractor-friend doesn't even have to be intentionally screwing you over. Just getting pushed out of their comfort zone or area of expertise to help can lead even good contractors into deep fuckery.

try to either get a personal friend who is a contractor to do it or have the personal friend contractor find you one that he knows to not be a total shit.

This depends on your friend circle. I doubt many people have direct ties to contractors, especially those living in cities.

The more realistic answer is doing your own due diligence using word-of-mouth recommendations from neighbors, non-contractor friends, and other acquaintances.

The 'For Real For Real' no longer works so well, at least in my area. Any "good" contractor has enough other work to do that they won't play by custom terms of scrupulous project managers.

Re: "For the REALEST", I was on my way to this before having a few kids. The time evaporated to the point that it's no longer practical. Unless you're willing to make that your job, your spouse is willing to not see you in the evenings, or your spouse is willing to live in an endless construction zone, it's just not an option imho.

I've simply excepted the dao of construction. I can turn my head a look at a stack of 2*4's right now.

become and omnitradsman

What resources did you use to acquire your current understanding and expertise? I hang on 4chan /diy/ sometimes and I suppose I’d just keep searching YouTube if needed.

I worked in the field for quite a while, but even before that I was simply extremely poor. The choice was learn how to plumb or have no water, because the landlord wasn't gonna do shit.

This applies to you too! Use your common sense here, but most things aren't that bad if you fuck them up. (excepting gas, electric, and non ground floor plumbing, those can be bad. be careful). Worse comes to worst, you have to do the call of shame and have someone clean up your mistake.

There is such a thing as best practices, you can usually get good specific advice on youtube and reddit, and be mindful of common safety failures. Eg, read the warning labels on everything, climbing on roofs is taking your life into your own hands, never trust an angle grinder (or any tool that spins faster than you can pedal a bike), etc.

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