Recall that the last time I wrote about my “simple” home reno was in this post. In that correspondence, I detailed how a less than communicative electrical subcontractor was causing me stress. When said electrical subcontractor finally showed up, they refused to do half the work and only did one of the two tasks I asked of them. They moved a power outlet for me but didn’t move a data outlet because they said the cables belonged to Telus and Shaw. That’s a ridiculous reason as Cat 5 and coax cables inside your home are yours and don’t belong to any telcos.
I chose to hire my own electrician who would was able and willing to move the data outlet. I did my own research and got a dude to come in last weekend. He was able to move the data outlet, even though he had to splice together extensions for the coax and Cat 5 cables. I tested the connections and everything was working great. As he was about to leave, he saw the power outlet the first electrician moved. He noticed something strange about it and took a closer look. He immediately saw work that wasn’t up to code. As he looked closer at the work, he found code violation after code violation. He honestly surprised at how terrible the job was for something so easy like moving a power outlet a few feet. I was really concerned about having an unsafe outlet in my home, so I asked the electrician if he could fix up the previous work and bring it up to code. Of course, I offered to pay him for the extra work. It took a bit to clean up the original crap job but he got it done.
I was very annoyed at my original contractor, for hiring that crap electrical subcontractor in the first place. I wrote him a strongly worded e-mail explaining what my own electrician found and I even included pictures of the shoddy work (before it got fixed) to prove to him what a mess it was. I also said that we would have a serious discussion about how much money he would take off the final bill once all the remaining work was done. To his credit, the contractor apologized for the work and agreed to not charge me for the electrical work for this project. I probably should have argued he should also pay or reimburse me for the second contractor as well but I just want this to be done.
The last part of the job is to fix up the dry wall as there are now several large holes in the wall from all the work that has been done. They also need to install some new floor moulding where the fireplace used to be. After that is done, I can put this home reno project behind me. I still think it was something I should have done but I learned a lot about the home contracting business from this one “simple” project.