Well I now have a very expensive fire hydrant in front of our house. The guy who put it in works for Genola City. When he was putting in our water meter he mentioned that he could get the parts for a few hundred dollars cheaper than the city (he knows this because he works for the city… sounds like a conflict of interest… but wait it gets better).
We get a call one night at 9:30 and I didn’t know who it was so we just didn’t answer it. The next morning I checked the messages and it was him saying that he was going to put in the fire hydrant at 7:30 am. It was already 8:30. So I called him and he said, “I’m putting it in right now. I just paid for all the parts myself so just write out a check to me and leave it at the city office. The total is $3300.00″. I thought it was expensive, but didn’t really know so I said, “Well that’s a lot of money so we will need to put it in our construction loan. I’ll talk to my brother Wade about it and see where we can fit it in.”
So I tell Wade about it and he said, “How much?!!! That’s a lot of money… Let’s check around to see what they are really going for, but there’s nothing we can do about it now since he just went ahead and did it.” Come to find out after checking around we could have had it put in for $2500.00. That’s $800.00 cheaper!
I’m not really happy with this guy and I told him that we couldn’t do more than 2 draws on our loan each month and that we were waiting until we had more invoices to turn it in. So he will have to float his check or have the store float him. I’m not paying him out of my pocket. He never told me how much it was going to be until after he did it, and he’s the one that needed to get it done so quickly. We don’t even need a hydrant until February at the earliest! The funny thing is, he thinks he is getting a deal, and apparently he is still getting ripped off! Anyway, here is a picture of our brand new shiny red fire hydrant..
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