faboo mama

This photo was taken on Feb. 8th, 2007. I hired Citywide Electrics to come and move the old plug meter box to the outside, and rewire some stuff. My estimate was $4200. When the work was supposedly finished, they said it was going to cost $5200 unless, we could find the old estimate. I was in Corona that day and hubby couldn’t find it, so we paid out an extra $1K.

In March, we found out that the wiring we paid for was never installed. When we had our lights in our living room, we hadn’t seen or heard anything from Citywide in almost a month. I had been calling because the city inspector wouldn’t sign off on the meter since it wasn’t where he said to put it. Okay, so when the electrician went to put the meter on the outside, I showed him the inspector’s sketch and said, “Well, at least it’ll be on the side of the house, so that I we cans still put the door from our bedroom to the backyard.” He goes to work, and I went outside later, to see him knocking tiles off the roof and cutting a hole in the roofline. He said, “I’m putting it here because it’s even between the side of the house and the window.” I said, “But what about my door?” He replied, “Oh, well, maybe later you can put this someplace else.” WTF?

Anyway, in March we had Luis come out to install the lights the electrician was supposed to have installed. He was up in the attic, trying to hook up the dining room light for us. He came back down, “I thought Lawrence was going to replace that wire up there?” I nodded, “He said he was. I saw him go up there with wire. Why?” “Well, the wire up there is all the old cloth covered stuff. The wires above the dining room light were all balled up and put together with masking tape. The stuff was smoking! That’s why I was up there so long. I was untangling all those wires. I thought Lawrence put in new stuff.” Sigh.

I immediately called Citywide, because 1) that’s unacceptable and 2) we were still using temporary power. I didn’t get a call back. Oh…the hole. I asked if Lawrence if he was going to repair the hole. He said not unless he was given permission, but usually he doesn’t fix holes. WHAT? When I had called Citywide before the estimate, my number 2 question was “Do you repair damage to walls or whatever if there are holes left?” and they said, Yes. So, there’s this big ol’ hole in my laundry room.

This photo was taken today:

So, for the last 6 months, every other week, I call and tell them the situation. I’ve only received one call back and that was in May. I was told that Lawrence broke his back, but he’ll come back out the next day and check on it. I explained to them that I will not be paying for anything at all, since I was charged for miles of copper wire that was never installed in my home. In the meantime, I’m unable to find any electrician willing to touch it. I’m still on temporary power, though now LADWP is charging me for it:

The meter reader from LADWP is just astounded that no one has even tried to come out to fix it. The thing that sucks is that I found them via Angie’s List. I don’t even know if I can complain to the List because the company hasn’t done anything to get back into contact with me!

So frustrating.

The While I’m at it… by faboo mama, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.