Contractor Cutting Corners

[Michael Hooper]

So I'm in the process of flipping my first home. I've learned a lot, one thing is to always be overly specific with contractors. I walked through the house with my contractor and explained everything I wanted done. They sent me a list of line items with a total at the bottom. Nothing was individually priced, just a total at the bottom. We went back and forth a few times and finally arrived at a price. The trouble I'm having is, the "contact" just had bulleted items like "New Kitchen Cabinets", "Modernize Fireplace", "Drywall Back Room", "New Flooring".

Now that we're almost done and I'm doing the walk through, I'm seeing a ton of things that just look bad. They're functional... they just aren't what I envisioned. For instance, there used to be a porch that we closed in. It used to have a door and I told him to just close it in and drywall over it to make that a closet (It came off a bedroom). So, he drywalled the room like we talk about, but on the outside of the house, where we removed the old exterior door, he just put a faux door over the hole instead of putting siding on it. No where in the contract does it say that he needed to also cover the exterior with vinyl, I just thought that was how you close in a room.

We also talk about modernizing the fireplace, which I mentioned painting the brick, and adding some shelves. Well, he ripped out the hearth exposing some ugly delapated brick and crumbling mortar, which he just painted over. Now he said he had to rip out the hearth because it was causing the floor to sag (fixing the flooring was also something I need him to do). I told him that it look terrible and we needed to re-cover up that old brick, so I asked him to build a light weight wooden hearth, and he wanted to charge me for it.

There are lot of other places, where he remodeled, and it is technically functional, it just looks like really shoddy work. Some of it I'm not even sure is up to code. What are my options here?

[Dennis M.]

Well Didn’t you check on the progress or did just wait around till he was done and become surprised