Chicago attorney Patti Gregory-Chang thought she’d done everything right when she hired a contractor to remodel her bathroom last year. References? Check. Up-to-date insurance? Check. A signed proposal with details of the work to be completed? Check. In fact, the same contractor had previously done some brickwork on the side of her driveway, and she’d been impressed by his professionalism.
But when Gregory-Chang returned from a weeklong vacation ready to get started on the bathroom, she found that her contractor had gone AWOL.
“He just walked,” she said. “We had had the initial meeting, we’d already started purchasing things, and all of a sudden he wouldn’t respond in any way. He just stopped calling back.”
Gregory-Chang said she’s thankful the contractor hadn’t actually begun demolition before he vanished, but his disappearing act meant she had to start all over again soliciting proposals for the remodeling job. It took her nearly a year to get a spot on another contractor’s calendar, and she’s out $300 in materials that couldn’t be used.
“I registered complaints with the appropriate [government] departments, and I had thought about suing since I’m an attorney, but who’s going to sue for $300?” she said.
Gregory-Chang’s only explanation for her contractor’s sudden departure is that he found a bigger, better job and figured it wasn’t worth his client’s time or effort to sue him over a broken contract. And, in most cases, say the experts, he’s right. Home remodeling woes regularly rank among the top 10 complaints at consumer fraud agencies such as the Better Business Bureau, but the options for forcing a flighty contractor to honor a verbal or written contract are limited. Far better, say experts, to do your homework on the contractor upfront–and then make sure you don’t pay too much money, too soon.
“When you resort to the legal end, it’s too late,” said Don Van Cura, president of Don Van Cura Construction Co. in Chicago, who has been in business for 20 years. “It’s way too aggravating, and it doesn’t get the [remodeling] job done.
“And you never want a situation where you’ve given the contractor half the value of the project when he hasn’t even started,” he added.
To boost the odds that your contractor will stick around, it helps to deal with a reputable company rather than a one-man band, advised Barbara Rose, president of S.N. Peck Builder Inc. of Chicago.
“Sometimes people hire quite unprofessional people–guys that have just been doing handyman kind of things and bid very low,” she said. “Then, when they [contractors] recognize they’re going to lose their shirts, they walk…Some people think they can `manage’ the contractor and hold him to his bid, but you just can’t force people to go into bankruptcy. Things cost what they cost.”
DeAnna Lee, a homemaker in Evergreen Park, is still trying to get her kitchen tiling job completed by a low-cost contractor she found through a local newspaper ad. She paid him $220 for his work in April, then discovered a few days later that some of the tiles were loosening and coming up.
“He said, `It won’t be a problem. I’ll come out there and correct it–it should take only 20 or 30 minutes to correct,'” Lee said.
The contractor never came. “He was going to give me a call one day during that week, but he never did. After that, every time I called him, he wouldn’t answer the phone, or he’d give me a day he would come out, and then he never showed up.”
Lee finally contacted the Better Business Bureau, which tried to arbitrate the dispute but got little cooperation from the contractor, who claimed the job was too small to warrant any more of his time.
Now, Lee said she’s planning to take the contractor to small claims court, with pictures of her kitchen floor and a bag of the loose tiles as evidence.
Replacing a contractor
Even if you don’t plan any legal action yourself, you may still want to consult with a lawyer to protect yourself, especially if you’re in the middle of a major renovation, Rose said.
“The original contractor may not have paid the subcontractors, and they can put liens on your house to get the money–you may be liable,” she said.
If you hire a new contractor to finish a job, said Rose, “that contractor needs to identify all the subcontractors and get waivers from them for all the past money paid. Write very good specifications to the new contractor, describing the work that [still] has to be done. You need to resolve any open issues.”
One of those issues may be the contract between you and the absentee contractor. You’ll want to send the contractor a letter by certified mail, demanding completion of the contract.
If you still owed the contractor money, you can put it in an escrow account to show your good-faith effort to hold up your end of the bargain.
And, sometimes, the good guys do win. Several years ago, Austin resident Kathy Foreman hired a contractor–referred to her by an acquaintance–to do aluminum siding and roof work.
“He gave me his address, his phone number, even the number to the attorney general’s office,” she said. “He brought pictures, let me call some of the people he’d done work for, and they said he was really good.”
After Foreman paid $6,000 as a deposit, however, the contractor never showed up to do the work and didn’t return any of her phone calls.
She eventually filed a complaint through the Illinois attorney general’s office, but was told there was little hope of ever seeing her money again.
Then, in mid-July, she got a call from the attorney general’s office that the contractor had gone to court, pleaded guilty–and would be paying back her $6,000.
– – –
Where to get help
If you feel you’ve been defrauded by a contractor, especially if you’ve lost money, you can get advice and help filing a complaint from these agencies:
– Consumer Fraud Division, Cook County State’s Attorney, 312-603-8700
– Consumer Fraud Bureau, Illinois Attorney General, 312-814-3000 or www. ag.state.il.us
– Department of Consumer Services, City of Chicago, 312-744-9400 or www.ci.chi.il.us/ConsumerServices/
– Better Business Bureau of Chicago & Northern Illinois, 312-832-0500 or www.chicago.bbb.org
— Elizabeth Brewster
