I purchased a serveral-year abandoned house. Yes, it needed a lot of help.

I asked John Lamping at Hirt & Ellco to fix some broken water lines, service a gas furnace (it hadn't seen a yearly service in who-knows-how-many years), and get the water pump up and running. I told them NOT to work on sinks, faucets, commodes etc as I can do things like that. Long lengths of pipes in a crawlspace isn't my thing, though. :-)

They sent me a bill for installing a hot water heater, replacing faucet parts like aerators and pop-ups, mounting a 2x4 to attach a shower head and other goofy stuff like that (and no... there's not a new hot water heater in the house now either). Along with this bill is over 13 hours of labor at a two person rate even though multiple neighbors agree with me that they were only at the house for about 6 hours.

The owner said he'd take everything related to faucets off the bill... yet the first two of the remaining line items are still "s.s. braided lavatory lines" and I'm supposed to not figure out these attach to a sink!! His idea of "fixing" the labor part of the bill was to remove a half-hour!

The funny part is the things they broke while there. (ok... it's not funny, but what else can you do?) They broke the seal around my tub while messing with getting the faucets to line up... as in it's almost two inches off low on one side and above on the other. They left a leaking line beside the hot water heater and put a paint can under it... by the time I got there, the whole carpet was soaked!

I offered to pay them for the work I had asked for (even though a bunch of that has had to be re-done since) and sent them a check for it... but not the rest of it. I figured it was ok with them because I didn't hear anything else (letters, bills, phone, nothing) for four months.

Now I have a letter from a collections company wanting even more than the original bill was for! AND they have my check! *AND* I've been paying the bills for the stuff I had to have re-repaired **AND** for fixing the stuff they messed up while they were there!!!