Paid $850 for a basement flood cleanup that came back 3 weeks later

Hired a crew off Kijiji back in February after my sump pump failed. They came in, ripped out the wet drywall, ran fans for two days, and handed me an invoice for $850. Said the moisture readings were all under 15 percent. Three weeks later I pulled the baseboard to check something and found black mold behind it. Turns out they never sealed the vapor barrier where the wall met the floor slab. Had to redo the whole thing myself for about $120 in materials. Anyone else get burned by a cheap emergency crew in Edmonton and end up doing the real fix on your own dime?

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nancybailey2mo ago

My buddy in the NW got screwed the exact same way last year with a crew he found on Facebook Marketplace. They told him the walls were dry and skipped the vapor barrier work too, and he ended up with that musty smell coming back in like a month. I read somewhere that most of these cheap Kijiji guys are just doing the bare minimum to get paid, and they count on you not checking behind the baseboards until it's too late. The kicker is, $850 sounds like a deal but you paid for the lesson, not the fix. You did the RIGHT thing redoing it yourself because the materials are cheap, it's just the labor that costs an arm and a leg, and clearly these guys ain't worth that. Next time, even a mid-range company from a google search is safer than rolling the dice on a guy with a van and a wet vac. Hope that mold didn't spread too far, because that's the part that REALLY gets expensive.

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