Yvonne Dovell didn't call a company out to her home to do the work. Instead, she said a man showed up and offered to clean her gutters for cheap.
"I was in the yard and this guy drives up and offers to clean my gutters--$25," Yvonne said.
At just $25, Yvonne thought she couldn't go wrong when it came to cleaning the gutters on her home.
"I can't do it. So, I said that's fine," she said.
But it wasn't fine. As one of the workers from Williams Roofing and Guttering was cleaning Yvonne's gutters, something went wrong.
One of the crewmembers working on Yvonne's roof said his leg went through the roof. Yvonne couldn't believe it because she said the part where the worker fell through was nowhere near the gutters. Instead, it was in the middle of the roof near the chimney.
"I think he just pushed it down far enough to where he had a hole in there. That's what I think. But there were no scratches, nothing on his pants or anything," Yvonne said.
What she also couldn't believe was the price to fix it.
"He said he could do it for $2,700. So I said, 'I don't have that kind of money.' So he went down to $1,600. I said, 'There's no way, you know. I'm still working as old as I am. And I just don't have it.'"
Yvonne went and got her neighbor and they got the price down to $800 to fix her roof.
"He asked me would I sign a contract. So I said yes. I didn't know what else to do, so I paid him $400, half of it," Yvonne said.
Yvonne said the worker patched her roof and was gone.
"So, and I got to thinking about it after I did all this, it just didn't seem right. You know, I've heard about this. I thought I was too smart for it to happen to me," she said.
Yvonne called me for help and I reached out to the owner of Williams Roofing and Guttering in Rocky Mount.
He said he found Yvonne at her Raleigh home as he was passing out flyers in her neighborhood for gutter cleaning.
When I asked him how Yvonne's $25 gutter job turned into a roofing repair that, at first estimate, cost more than $2,500 to repair, he said the section of the roof where the worker fell through was rotten. He said that the first price was to fix the whole back side of the roof. The $800 was just to patch the hole around the chimney that was damaged.
He added that if the roof was not rotten, his worker never would have fallen through.
The owner also said if Yvonne was not happy about the price for the job, she could have said something to him. He agreed to work it out with Yvonne. He called her and agreed not to make her pay the remaining $400 of the $800 roof repair.
Yvonne is relieved, but said she has learned a lesson -- from now on she is not going to hire anyone who just shows up at her door offering services, especially at a great price.
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