Why Everyone Should Marry a Plumber and a Tile Guy (as well as an auto-mechanic)

All my beautiful bathroom needs is a new old valve for the bathtub (where I take the SF equivalent of the sponge bath I took in Tonga, where there was no running water and we realized the preciousness of what we drew from the well).  But they don't make them anymore.

So since January of this year, I've been trying to get a tile guy and a plumber scheduled for the same day or two so once the beautiful tile is removed I won't have a big gape in the wall.

In the meantime, I had a big problem with my kitchen faucet,  and when my local plumber couldn't come right away, I called in a plumber from Ben Franklin, and they came right over.  But guess how much they charged for switching my old faucet with a new one--a task that took them ten minutes?

(I just had a tile guy guess, and you know how people try to go way over so you won't feel bad the way they try to go way under when guessing your age?  He said "Three hundred dollars.")

  They charged me $538.00!

They said they'd be back soon to take care of the bathtub valve.  That was in June.  They came back today, the last day of September.

In the meantime, my regular plumber gave me a lower estimate, as did the tile guy, and a friend who owns 7 houses and knows about this kind of repair arrived yesterday and said they shouldn't be removing the tiles at all but should be going in through the wall behind.

So I called in advance to alert them to my reconsidering.

The plumber and the tile guy from Ben Franklin just left.  The told me that the spout comes out directy in the middle--between the hot and the cold--so they can't just open it up from the back side.  The plumber has to move the spout up.  The tile guy has to chip the tile.  But they still need to mess with the east wall in the dining room, which they say is either sheet rock or plaster.  My friend-who-owns-7-houses says it's plaster.

But she slept through all this.

I told the tile man that I had a second "bid" for $200 to $400 less, depending upon whether he can save the tile, and the tile guy said the tile can't be saved and I should be careful about hiring someone who doesn't do good work.  I said I have confidence in both tile men, but I have a preference for the lower price.  (That's when I asked them to guess how much I paid for the kitchen faucet.)

And that's why we should all marry a plumber and a tile guy as well as an auto-mechanic...although I have to say, knock on steel, that I haven't had any car trouble for a long, long time!