Unfortunately, you’re going to hear some horror stories if you’ve been in the remodeling industry for very long. (We’ve been doing remodeling for many years now.) Here are two horror stories we can share so you don’t have to go through the same thing yourself. We had to come into the picture to help these clients after they dealt with an expensive issue.
The Tale of The Vanishing Itemizations
We came in to finish a project for a client who had gotten a contract from a local remodeler. Because the contract wasn’t itemized, the client had to take the remodeler’s word for what he was going to do. Unfortunately, he ended up being left with a banged up kitchen. The situation could have been prevented by simply making sure that item selections like tile color, cabinet material, and countertop drawings were all itemized in the contract. Sadly, this story didn’t have a happy ending. The client ended up spending over $40,000 to fix the problem.
This should be an illustration of why you need to know exactly what you’re paying for. Any time you see a contract with a lump sum and no itemized costs, you’ll have no way to tell if the price accurately reflects the work being done. Beware, because there are many pieces that go into a remodeling project.
We just recently had a potential client call to compare our price with another contractor. We asked them if they had a contract with itemized prices, and they said they only got a paper with a lump sum on it. They wouldn’t have had any way to tell if they were supposed to get a chipboard cabinet or a set of wood cabinets.
The Inexperienced Jack-of-all-trades
This second horror story takes place with a client who had hired a jack-of-all-trades to remodel their bathroom. It had been almost a year and the bathroom still wasn’t completed. Quite frankly, he just didn’t have the experience to do the job. He took shortcuts and did things wrong because he was naive about how to do the job properly. He had also attempted to install an expensive tile shower. If done incorrectly, the tile can start leaking and causing damage to the home.
It took us a little under three weeks to fix the mess that had been left for this client. That shows the job definitely didn’t have to take a year if the client would have hired someone competent. Unfortunately, we had to tear out a lot of the plumbing pipes that were installed incorrectly. If not, the client would have probably had stopped-up toilets in the future.
In the end, this client had to take the contractor to court to recoup their money. They had paid over $10,000 for a deposit along with the associated court costs.
The moral of this story is, make sure the person you hire for a bathroom remodel is someone trustworthy and competent.
If you have a horror story of your own and need us to fix the problem, contact us online or give us a call at (540) 685-0366.
