HODGES R W PLUMBING

He is a gentleman, very polite, and clean. He also does nice work, and is very neat. I have referred him to two other friends, and they were both very pleased with him.

We were extremely disappointed in the quality of this plumber's work. 1) We purchased a new washer/dryer for our second floor bathroom (which was completely un-needed) after it stopped working several days after Hodges started working in our home. When we asked Hodges and the general contractor if they had done anything that would cause the washer to stop working, they said that it must have broken. We ordered a new washer/dryer combo and when the installer arrived there was no water coming into the washer. He checked the basement and found that the plumber had never turned the water back on. Hodges never apologized for the unneeded $1200 expense of replacing a washer/dryer that wasn't even broken. 2) When Hodges installed the new toilet in our powder room, we found water all over our marble floors in the second floor bath which is immediately above the new powder room. This upstairs bathroom had been gut renovated several months before and had all new plumbing fixtures including an expensive new St. Thomas toilet with a quiet flush. When Hodges came to fix the leak on the 2nd floor the next day, his explanation was "This always happens in old houses when you install a new toilet." He then put in a new part on the St. Thomas toilet which has completely changed the level of flushing noise. When we asked about the loud flush, he said that he used a replacement part, not an original St. Thomas part. 3) The straw that broke the camel's back is when we had water damage to the hardwood floor where he had installed the new powder room toilet. Apparently, it was a slow leak that we hadn't noticed for several months until the floorboards in the powder room started to "cup". We originally thought it was the way the flooring had been installed so called a floor contractor to repair it. When we finally got a floor contractor to look at this small repair (the original floor man had moved to Texas) he said it was a probably a toilet leak rather than a floor installation problem and said we should get the plumber who had installed the toilet to come check it. We immediately called the contractor who called Hodges. From the time the Hodges plumber arrived, he had an attitude and was looking for a way to blame the leak on someone else. When he asked us if anyone else had worked on the toilet, we told him it had been stopped up several days ago and our regular plumber had come out to unstop it. He immediately said he wasn't responsible since our plumber had worked on the toilet. When we reminded him that we had noticed the floor cupping weeks before our own plumber had unstopped the toilet, he basically insinuated that we were lying ("How do I know that what you're saying is true?"). Bottom line..he fixed the leak (or so he says) but says Hodges isn't responsible for damage to the floorboards if they don't subsequently flatten out. We should have demanded our contractor fire this plumber early on when he didn't accept responsibility for the other problems.