Need some insight into what the etiquette or expectation is in situations like ours please!
We moved into a fixer upper 9 months ago. We've been having an utter nightmare getting tradespeople to quote to do anything (electrics, plastering, plumbing, building, you name it!!) so even doing bits ourselves, progress is slow. With two young children we're desperate to get the downstairs WC back in action but there are some parts that we aren't skilled enough to do - ie chasing radiator pipes into the wall and relocating the water feed to another corner of the room. We had five different plumbers come out, only 2 provided a quote (I had to chase them) and 1 of them openly said he was quoting high as he didn't really want the job. So we went with the only one who'd provided a quote and actually was wanting the job. He advised that our proposed layout wasn't a good idea for the space and suggested we buy a vanity unit to go in a different corner. We agreed this was the right move and purchased one before booking him in to come and move the pipes.
He came out at the end of last week, I asked when he arrived did he want to see the new vanity unit that was going into the space and he casually replied no it was fine. He did both jobs, I paid him, done. However... We went to mark the vanity unit today as we need to drill the holes to feed the new pipes through and realised that the plumber has located the new waste pipe pretty much flush against the wall, which isn't tiled yet... So there's no way there's enough clearance to fit it. I didn't want to bother him over the weekend as he'd mentioned to me that he gets pestered regularly outside of working hours I so waited to message him asking what a solution might be until this morning. He read the message but I've had no reply.
It feels like a grey area to me. Half of me thinks that on paper the job was to relocate the pipes, which he did. The other half of me feels like he might be obligated to rectify this as he knew it was for a vanity unit (which he himself suggested!) he knew that the walls were going to be tiled afterwards as he'd asked me and he declined to see the unit which would have given him an idea of where to position the pipe. DH thinks he can fix it if we saw the pipe and buy some new bits, but I want to see if the plumber will help us first. Just feels like we paid him nearly £400 for a job that still hasn't got us to where we need it to be. Any thoughts on what I should expect as an outcome would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. (Also if anyone has a magic wand that gets people to provide quotes I'm after one of those too!)