Chabot Electric

Bert Chabot has been working on various electrical projects in our house over the past year and a half. (June 2008) We built our house from 2003-2005 and had a terrible contractor. (Bill Fitzpatrick out of Pacifica: grade F-!) Before we eventually fired him, the contractor went through six electricians. The resulting hodge-podge of pass-the-buck work completed and the remaining projects still undone, left quite a mess to be sorted out. I feel like the angels were smiling on me finally, however, when a neighbor recommended Bert. He is just the guy for the job. First, he does great work with care and pride. One example in an endless list follows. We wanted outlets in our living room floor. On his own initiative, he found a better cover option than what we had, but it was smaller and round. The hole had already been cut for a standard rectangular fitting. He patched the hole perfectly and then made (yes, made) a tool to cut a perfect hole in the hardwood floor to produce a fully flush, practically invisible final result. Two other outlets in the room had been completed a different time by an earlier worker -- a professional wood worker supposedly -- but they were not flush at all. And since they were the other, clunkier cover plate that Bert had not recommended, there was no hope that they would ever look as good. Bert pays careful attention to detail and takes pride in high quality work. And second, he's smart. (How many subcontractors have you worked with who get a gleam in their eye when they talk about physics?!) We needed a real sleuth to find the problems left by our nightmare contractor and fix them creatively since all the walls are closed up and finished. So far, anything we want, he has been able to figure out a way to fix. He has an inventor's mind. I want my phone AC adapter to disappear by plugging in inside the wall, but the stone work around the niche for the phone has already been installed? No problem! The results are clever and invisible. Just what I wanted. My landscape lighting was supposed to be controlled from a panel in the kitchen but the feeds were pulled and filled in before the job was completed, but Bert found a way. Etc. Etc... What's more, he has found at least two situations which could have resulted in an electrical fire. Although it's not hard to be a hero when you are compared to the people working for my contractor, Bert gets credit for keeping his eyes open and taking the initiative to look for problems. Most people do their job and get on with it. Not Bert. He makes it all his business. For example, for some unknown reason one of the previous electricians installed the wires in our attic by tightly winding them around the ends of the roof trusses where there is a metal plate fastening the wooden boards of the trusses together. As the house flexes the sharp edge of the metal plate cuts through the plastic insulation and comes in contact with the wire. (What were they thinking!?!?!) I don't even remember what Bert was doing up there when he discovered it (replacing our upstairs hall lights I think), but thank goodness he noticed. In another example, some built in cabinets were supposed to have had lighting in the open shelves area and a charging bank inside the drawers. When Bert went in to complete that abandoned project, he found that the previous electrician had left the hot wires completely unprotected and exposed. I just thank my lucky stars that we found Bert in time. And finally, he's so sweet. After all the people I have worked with who bring only expletives to mind, I couldn't believe this gentle, responsible, cheerful fellow who showed up on my doorstep two summers ago. He is great. You can't go wrong with him. In fact I feel like I should explain the "B"-rating I gave him for punctuality and professionalism. They have much more to do with how our relationship has evolved than what I think he is capable of. He is a real "A" player. The ratings are inaccurate because my answers are actually an off-shoot of the fact that we have become a kind of friends. I have come to trust him enough that I just give him a list of projects, and he runs with it. He buys the stuff and comes to install it or fix things on his own schedule. I love that I don't have to micro-manage him at all. The job may not be finished by some exact predetermined moment, but I am secure in the knowledge that the work is going to magically get done without any hassles for me. So the "B" doesn't really reflect any lack of punctuality and professionalism; it is that we have moved beyond the need to worry about such things. A telling aspect of how much I trust him is that we have told him the codes to our garage and back door and fully trust him to come and go respecting our property and privacy.