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Temple woman expected to pay $95 to get sprinkler system looked at, got billed thousands for full replacement

Shirley Osenga said a local contractor only dug up two spots in her lawn to fix some leaks. The contractor is adamant that he did the work she paid for.

TEMPLE, Texas — A Temple woman said she asked a contractor to inspect her sprinkler system for $95 and do some landscaping work, but then he billed her for $9,000, after he claimed to have replaced the whole system.

"He said that he would check out our whole irrigation system for $95," Osenga said. "I thought that was pretty good to make sure the system was in order."

Shirley Osenga hired local contractor Ruben Alvarez of Alvarez Professional Services to do the work. Orsenga told Channel 6 she initially paid the bill because she did not know what to do, but now she can't find the work he supposedly did.

Both Osenga and her son told Channel 6 the system worked fine beforehand, but then Alvarez told them his inspection showed problems with it. 

"He started finding all these things wrong," she said.

The first bill Osenga got for the system was more than $3,000. The bill said the system needed to be redone. The second bill for the system was $1,400. Two more invoices for landscaping cost several thousand dollars each.

Osenga said Alvarez never gave her a quote before starting the work, but Alvarez told Channel 6 on the phone that claim was not true and insisted they talked about the prices beforehand. 

"I went over every single thing that was done with them," Alvarez said. "They had to approve it."

That said, Alvarez also told Channel 6 there was no separate quote given to Osenga and said he explained everything on the invoice. He said she knew he was going to replace the system. 

"I told her you are having to do everything on your system, as if you were getting a new system," he said. "She had problems!" 

Osenga disagreed, and also said a lot of the work listed on the invoices may not have been done at all. 

"He didn't put in a new system!" she said. "What kind of system did he put in? All he did was put heads on!" 

Alvarez's invoices also said he put in a pump and had to dig out and replace the sprinkler heads and flush the lines. 

"No, he didn't have to dig everything up," Osenga said. "Except the two spots where there was a leak." 

Alvarez said he did the work. 

"They knew everything that I did there," he said. "I did not do anything wrong." 

Alvarez told KCEN Channel 6 he will be back out to Osenga's house on Tuesday to explain where he dug up and installed everything she and her son paid for. 

Expect more from Channel 6 as we follow up on this story next week.

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