Common Sense
Send a certified letter to the contractor and outline the work that has yet to be completed. Tell him if the work is not completed in two weeks time, you will hire someone else to finish the job and will not be making any further payments to him as a result.
Then, follow through.
I owed my contractor just $800. from a $32K job that he did not complete. I called and called, to no avail. I finally ended up hiring someone else to finish the job and that cost was only $350. I ended up saving money in the long run. About a year later, I bumped into the contractor and he mentioned that he never collected the final payment. I laughed at him and said that was because he never finished framing the ceiling that joined the addition to the existing house. Suddenly a light bulb went off in his head and he seemed to remember that little detail. Too funny.
?
Do you have a contract in writing, drawings, specifications, do you have photos, did you keep a construction diary, and what is your position and what you think the position of the contractor. The first thing you need to do is write it all down and be sure that the contractor has your position on the matter, and your understanding of his. So, what you need to do is reconstruct all of this as good as you can and furnish it to him in a letter. Like what you contracted for, the price, the payments, etc. What the deficiencies are, what you want done to fix them, what he won't do and what he agreed to do, but hasn't. Somewhere in the contract, he should have had a completion date. If not give him a reasonable date in the letter, and upon which you will take over the work. Then, you can hire another contractor and complete the work. Now, you still owe him for his contract price, but you subtract out the cost of the second contractor. So the first contractor gets only the difference regardless of how much he has put into the project. If you did this right, the contractor will have more into it than you have paid him, so he will lose money. Which means he should come back and complete the job. You should also furnish him a date to respond to you letter and to return to the job and start work. You want to establish reasonable dates so that if they are not met, it means that the guy is demonstrating that he is no in compliance with the agreement. If this is a sizable job, you might need a lawyer to clean up your letter, but all of the content will have to come from you, since you are the only one that knows what is going on. Never, ever build anything without a written scope, drawing, specification, schedule and payment detail of what you are wanting done to attach to the contract. If you don't know what you want, no one else will either. If you do all of that and then inspect the work as it is built, you will get what you want and everyone will be happy.
D J
Small claims court or Judge Judy!
Blessed
contact better business bureau, then attorney general of your state, then get a lawyer
Anonymous
My parents had to go through this. The contractor kept asking for more and more money and he left when they wouldn't pay more than the amount they agreed on, He kept wanting to get the money earlier. He ended up leaving having done most of the work but only got some of the money because he was being all weird. I'd recommend just leave it and hire a different contractor to finish the job.