Imagine having a day job in an office but also moonlighting in construction with your dad. If your coworkers knew you were handy with home repairs, would you be willing to help them out if they needed some work done?

In this story, one man is in this situation, and he is happy to help out a coworker. The problem is that she isn’t willing to pay for everything he needs in order to do the repairs correctly.

Keep reading to see how the story plays out.

Sure, don’t listen to the guys who do this job for a living.

Years ago, I used to work as a medical biller for a surgery center.

The administrator who ran the place knew that I worked construction with my father as well on my off-times, doing remodeling and building houses. As such she commissioned us to do some work for her at her personal home.

It was small projects, really: installing a new garbage disposal, installing a new mailbox, installing a projector in the ceiling. Easy stuff.

Now before I get into the main part of this story, I must tell you, she was very stingy with money.

Here are some examples of how she was stingy…

We had an autoclave that needed servicing at work, and she refused to pay for the worker’s travel time of 2 hours for a 30 minute job.

She refused to pay a lot of the medical equipment bills until she was threatened with collection notices or refusal to send any future items.

She even told us to not waste patient bands who were no shows, and instead place another patient’s sticker over the old ones (which could be a HIPAA violation, but she didn’t care).

This is important to know.

OP agreed to help her out with a home repair.

One day, she came to me and asked if we could take a look at her flooring in her exercise room. She had said the water heater had busted and as a result from sitting too long, her flooring was swollen from being waterlogged.

So my dad and I went over there to assess the situation, and determined that we could do the job for a total of $400 plus material. We weren’t out to strike it rich, but really to help the community by providing quality service at a low rate.

She was happy with the price, and told us she would pick out the new wood she wanted laid down.

We told her that she would need about 100 slats for the repair we were going to do as well as new plywood for the base. She seemed okay with that.

But she didn’t buy all the necessary supplies.

She went to Los Angeles one weekend, and came back with material that she wanted to use for the flooring. Only, she had about 30 of the requested 100 to do the job properly. On top of that, she did not think that she needed to get a new sheet of plywood.

We informed her that the old plywood was moldy, swollen, and would only cause problems down the road.

She eventually agreed to purchase the plywood replacement, but she was not going to purchase more wooden slats. Instead, she demanded that we use most of what was already there (yes, the swollen pieces), but to tear up the slats in the little alcove that was not hit with water damage and place the damaged ones there.

They tried to reason with her.

We did everything we could to convince her this was a bad idea.

We told her that wood doesn’t magically shrink when it dries out.

We told her that joining the swollen pieces with non-swollen pieces would be near impossible.

We told her that the moisture would invite more trouble down the road and provide for an uneven floor setting.

She was having none of it. She knew better, and did not want to spend more than she already had.

She got what she paid for.

So… we went to work.

We tore up the old pieces, saved the best ones, and started laying down the new pieces first.

Then we tore up the pieces in the alcove and matched them with the new pieces, too. Per her instructions, we placed the least damaged slats in the alove, doing everything we could to make it look presentable.

Lo and behold, though, it was all uneven. It raised in spots. It had gaps in spots. It didn’t fit quite right.

But that’s what she wanted done, and that’s what she was going to get.

She didn’t like the way it looked.

Despite our best efforts, we were absolutely SHOCKED when she said that the flooring looked horrible, despite us telling her that it would look horrible with the damaged slats.

Okay, no, we really weren’t shocked at all.

She demanded that we tear up the floor AGAIN and fix it the right way.

We told her “Sure, but you’ll have to pay us another $400, plus get the other slats that we requested.”

It ended up costing her a lot to get the job fixed correctly.

She got livid, said we were horrible people, and refused to continue on.

The next day, I quit the job after she came in and badmouthed my dad in front of my coworkers.

But I heard from my coworkers that she had to hire someone else to do the job, and it cost her $1200 for the labor alone, plus another $400 in wooden slats. All because she was so certain she knew better than the guys who have been doing the work for years.

She got what she wanted, and she got what she paid for. She just didn’t realize it was going to be as bad as they said it would be.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Do people really think this?

A translator has a similar problem.

He could’ve handled it another way.

This person has had good luck with contractors.

Experts are experts for a reason.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.