Vulcan Basement Waterproofing arrived at 9am this morning to start (and, I was told) complete the job of installing a water overflow system. The crew of about 7-8 guys dug a trench (at the cost of some damage to wall sheetrock),\u00c2\u00a0 installed the gravel surrounded pipes leading to the sump pump and installed the sump pump.<\/p>\n
During the course of jackhammering through the concrete basement floor, the Vulcan crew hit PVC pipes that consolidate wastewater for the entire building before it enters the sewer trap (before exiting the building). Granted, I didn’t know the pipes were located in the work area — but Raj (the foreman) assured me that their plumber (Pete the plumber) would be out in a few hours to finish the job (at no additional cost). The rest of the crew put a fresh concrete floor in above the gravel\/pipe and took off.<\/p>\n
Flash forward 5 hours — like an idiot, I phoned in the credit card info for payment just before the crew left (ignoring the whole Never, never pay for a job unless it’s totally done rule) — as of now, the plumber still hasn’t arrived so showers, toilets, sinks, dishwashers… anything that uses water is totally out of commission. The people at Vulcan tried calling him and were shot directly to voicemail, I tried calling him, got through\u00c2\u00a0and asked for an ETA. He said anywhere from 5pm to 6pm (it’s now 7:30pm), as of now I’m guessing that he’s a no-show and on a Friday night, it’s looking like Monday will be the first chance I get to talk to Vulcan’s billing dept about this.<\/p>\n
UPDATE<\/strong><\/p>\n Pete the Plumber did come back late last night (10:00pm) to at least get the showers & toilets up and running. He came back this morning to finish the job of putting down gravel & then cementing over the gravel. Before leaving, he said that we should consider replacing the caps on the sewer traps with PVC screw top ones. Wait… one of the reasons why I went with this “solution” was because Vulcan Basement Waterproofing said that their system could handle any overflows from the trap.\u00c2\u00a0Pete corrected that thinking by telling me that this system was designed to keep water from coming up into the basement from the floor\/walls — if I wanted to reduce the chances of the sewer traps popping and flooding the basement, I could raise the traps three feet and that should take care of some of the problem.<\/p>\n Shit.. I might have just blown a couple grand on something that doesn’t fix the problem it was supposed to. Think I’ll be calling the Vulcan “Manager and Chief Estimator” (Allen Caplan) that priced and scoped out this project to find out how this system addresses the problem I contracted Vulcan Basement Waterproofing (Flushing, NY) about.<\/p>\n Technorati Tags: Contractors<\/a> | Construction<\/a> | Home Improvement<\/a> | Flooding<\/a> | New York<\/a> | Technical Difficulties<\/a> | Small Time Landlord<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Vulcan Basement Waterproofing arrived at 9am this morning to start (and, I was told) complete the job of installing a water overflow system. The crew of about 7-8 guys dug a trench (at the cost …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contractors","category-improvements","category-technical-difficulties"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.smalltimelandlord.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.smalltimelandlord.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.smalltimelandlord.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.smalltimelandlord.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.smalltimelandlord.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.smalltimelandlord.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.smalltimelandlord.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.smalltimelandlord.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.smalltimelandlord.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}