Rick and Jane from Toronto

We had Russ do a plumbing rough-in for a new bathroom. After working on the job for about a week, he indicated that he was going to complete the job that day so we left a cheque for him. That was our mistake, he didn't actually complete the job that day, he completed about 85% of the job, left us a note saying he would come back the following week to test for leaks and finish drilling the hole for the ventilation pipe. He did take the cheque that day and it took us over 2 months of to get him back to test the work. He never did complete the work to drill the hole for the ventilation, we had to do that ourselves after the 3rd month of unanswered phone calls and texts. We explained to him when he gave us the quote for the job that we had a permit for the work and would need to get it inspected. He told us he was a licensed plumber and that the inspection would be no problem, having said that, I would have expected him to know the inspection requirements detailed in the Ontario building code and the work to be completed to meet code requirements. When it came time to do the inspection, we were told it was Ontario building code to have a pressure test completed in the presence of the inspector. We weren't prepared to wait for the possibility of Russ to come back to do that so had to hire another plumber to do that work. Russ's work failed the inspection with numerous issues including improper pipe sizes and fittings, some fittings had no glue on them, there were numerous leaks in the waste stack, the stack and exhaust weren't sloped in the proper direction. One of the issues was using the incorrect size pipe to connect to the city sewer system, knowing it had to be replaced we dug it up and found that the pipe wasn't even connected, there was a 1 cm gap that he "fixed" by wrapping and gluing a plastic bag around fitting. Russ claims to be a licensed plumber, but it's hard to believe a licensed plumber would think this is acceptable work, regardless of whether it was going to have to pass a formal inspection. We ended up having to hire another plumber to come in and redo the work Russ did for us.