All Forum Posts by: Johanna Athas

I just spoke with the attorney and he was not at all surprised by my situation once I told him the name of the company we used.  He said he has heard MANY very similar horror stories about them from other clients and has handled several similar cases.  Next week, we are going to have another contractor come in and do an estimate to see approximately how much it will cost to clean up their mess and then go from there.

According to our insurance company (Liberty Mutual), any checks over a certain amount (I forgot the exact amount) to a homeowner who have a mortgage are required to have the mortgage company included on them.  This a very, very common practice (my husband works in insurance and sees this all the time).  The first half that we paid them was released from our mortgage company to us, which we then gave to the contractor.  This was to help cover the cost of the materials and the mortgage company is holding the remaining amount until a satisfactory inspection has been completed, which, like I said, they will not even order until these above mentioned issues have been taken care of.  

Yes, of course the mortgage company wants to protect their asset; however, they also want to protect us, the homeowners, from being ripped off, which this company is clearly trying to do. 

 Yes, they released them to me; however, it was a 2-party check to both myself and my mortgage company, so the mortgage company is holding the funds and they will schedule an inspection once these issues with the flooring and cabinets have been taken care of, but they won't even consider scheduling the inspection until that has been done in order to protect us.  They definitely won't release the funds until the inspection has been completed and has passed.

I have already spoken with a law firm and given them all of the information and I will be receiving a call back from an attorney early next week.  The woman at the law firm who took all of my information could not believe all that we have been through with this company and she agreed that it sounds like they would try to file a fraudulent lien by fudging the dates and trying to use the dates that the project manager stopped by to fix more minor things under warranty as an extension to file the lien, which they cannot do.  I agree.  I just need an attorney to send some letters on my behalf and to help me cut ties with these people so that I can move on with my life and hire someone else to come and fix their mess. 

Ok, I just put a call into an attorney who handles these sorts of situations.  I am now waiting for a call back.  What's funny is that I called another attorney office before that and as soon as I told the woman who answered the phone the name of the company, she said, "Don't tell me anymore!  We represent them!!!"  Ugh!  Leave it to me to pick THEIR attorney as the first one to call!  Oh well, at least I found another one who handles these things and they will be calling me back shortly. 

I have already filed complaints with both our homeowner's insurance company as well as the referral service that they use to refer customers to contractors, which is who referred us to these god awful people.  However, that complaint went absolutely nowhere and they were totally useless, despite me making MULTIPLE complaints to them earlier in the year.  The guy who was assigned to my complaint at the referral service sounded like he was high on drugs whenever I spoke with him and he told me, "We've never really had any other complaints about this company, so they must be doing something right."  Absolutely unreal.

Honestly, we do not even want these people back in our home.  Every time they have come to "fix" something, they just end up screwing something else up and cause even more problems.  We just want to cut all ties with these horrific people and have someone else come in and fix their screw ups.  

Wow, thanks for all of the great advice!  I agree with what most people have said in that their time clock for filing a lien started ticking the minute I signed the project completion paperwork back in January or February, but I do plan to find an attorney in our area who deals with this sort of thing and I will call and see if I can run this situation by them and then, if they say that this company is in the wrong, I will set up an actual consult with them.  I have heard sooooooo many horror stories about t his company after we had already hired them and we are kicking ourselves.  Never in my life have I dealt with such chaos and incompetence.  Also, they ARE a licensed company, so I will contact our state's licensing board as well and run this by them.

To answer another question, yes we did receive a contract with a full outline of the work, estimated completion dates, and cost.  I have a copy of it right here on my desk.

I am not going to pay for work that is faulty and for damage that they caused and have not done anything to correct.  I am not going to fold and allow them to bully me into paying them until they replace my cabinets and my flooring.  It is not up to me anyway.  Our mortgage company is the one holding the money, not me, and they will not even schedule the inspection until these issues have been addressed and resolved.  They are doing this to protect me.  Lastly, it has been WELL over 120 days since they technically completed the project, so they have lost their right to a lien in this state, unless they try to do it fraudulently.  

@ Maugno Mora - I'm sorry, but you are...???  You don't even know HALF of the hell that we have been going through while dealing with this company, so before you make assumptions, make sure that you have a full understanding of the story.  And if expecting the work that I AM PAYING THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS FOR to be done correctly and NOT have buckling, splitting floors or damaged kitchen cabinets makes me a "picky homeowner," then so be it.  Just so you have a better idea of what we have been dealing with over the course of the past year, we have had cracking, moving tile floors in our kitchen because the project manager "forgot" to make sure that we had the proper floor joist support in our basement to handle this new tile floor as we previously had wood in our kitchen.  Then, while our kitchen floor looked like it had been in a record breaking earthquake, it took them NEARLY A MONTH to replace it.  Even after they replaced it, they did not leave enough grout, making the tiles sit ABOVE the grout line.  Following this, they damaged our brand new $1500 refrigerator while moving it and subsequently flooded our basement when the idiotic worker decided to try and hook up the water line to the refrigerator himself instead of waiting for the plumber to arrive.  That is just a tiny snippet of what we have been dealing with.  I do not have the time to write a novel about the rest of this living hell that we have been experiencing.  It is totally irrelevant to the current situation anyway.  if these people now refuse to replace the cabinets that they damaged as well as the hardwood flooring, then we are going to have to pay for another contractor to do so out of our own pockets and, believe me, I WILL turn around and sue these people for the amount that we have to pay to have their work corrected/replaced.  

Thanks for the advice!  Both our mortgage company as well as our insurance company are fully aware of the situation.  In fact, we even filed a complaint with the referral service that our homeowner's insurance company uses to refer customers to contractors, which is how we got hooked up with this company, but they were essentially useless.  They had the gall to say to me, "Well, we've never had any other complaints about them, so they must be doing something right."  REALLY????  The good thing is that I still have EVERY SINGLE email that was exchanged between the project manager and myself regarding all of the repairs that needed to be done and the ones that they still have yet to repair.  I even have the most recent emails where the he refused to take responsibility for the floors buckling and splitting and tried to blame us.  I have an entire year's worth of emails.  I will definitely also contact the BBB about this since I know they are registered with the BBB.  Come to find out, my parents had a horrific time with this exact same company back in 1999 (I was in high school back then) when they installed new flooring for them and I remember what an awful job they did.  I had no idea that this was the same company they used until just recently since I was only 17 then!  I have attached a photo of what they did to our brand new kitchen cabinets.  It makes me want to cry looking at it.  :(  We don't currently have an attorney, but I think I am going to look for one to consult with.  Would it be wise for me to send them a letter to them myself stating that I am fully aware of the lien laws and know that it has been well past 120 days since their last actual work (not just stopping by to repair little things), or should I speak with an attorney first?  I spoke with an old friend who I grew up with who now works for an insurance company and he deals with this company on a very regular basis and told me how HORRIBLE and SNEAKY they are, so I would not put it past them to attempt filing a fraudulent lien.  

Hi everyone,

I hope I'm posting this in the correct forum. I really have no idea which category this would fall under, but this seemed like the most appropriate one. Here is our situation that I could really use a bit of advice on:

Last year (fall of 2015), we had a remodeling/restoration company perform repairs/remodel to our home after an insurance claim as a result of significant water damage. They installed new kitchen countertops, cabinets, and flooring throughout most of our home. We paid them half of the balance up front and our mortgage company is holding the remaining balance from our insurance company. This company's work was so incredibly poor that they kept having to come back at various times over the past year to fix things that were coming apart, breaking, and just overall very poor workmanship. After they did the work on our home, we found out from several people how horrible this company is and that they are notorious for extremely low quality work, being very sneaky and dishonest, and ripping homeowners and their insurance companies off, but they were who our homeowner's insurance company's referral service recommended we use when we filed our claim. We have been dealing with this horrible company for a little over a year now because their work was so horrible and, like I said, they've kept having to come back to repair various things as a result of their exceedingly poor workmanship. Now, the hardwood flooring in our living room is splitting and buckling in several areas and the same wood flooring in our dining room looks just plain awful as several of the planks sit up higher than others. It's actually a tripping hazard! We don't think they put in an appropriate expansion gap when they installed it to allow the wood to expand and contract. Additionally, last year when their painter was here painting the kitchen walls after the new cabinets were installed, he put painter's tape on the sides of two of the cabinets in our kitchen and when he peeled it off, it took the finish right off of these two cabinets, making us think that they ordered much cheaper, much lower quality cabinets than what we had ordered and what they charged us for. They have refused on multiple occasions to replace the cabinets that were damaged, despite our repeated requests, and they just put some ugly, tacky pieces of floor trim/molding over them as a bandaid to hide the damage. The trim pieces that they put up do not even really match and it is a total eyesore! Our mortgage company has been made aware of these issues and they will not schedule the final inspection of their work to release the remaining funds until these issues have been fixed. They are doing this to protect us, the homeowners, which make perfect sense to me. We have informed the contracting company of this, so they are fully aware. Now, for the past couple of months, they have been threatening/harassing us on a regular basis with phone calls and by leaving notes on our front door and in our mailbox to put a lien on our property if we don't give them a date for the inspection, which the mortgage company will not even order until these problems are fixed.

Here is the catch. After doing some research, my husband and I now know that in our state (Maine), a mechanics lien MUST be filed within 120 days of the work being completed. If that is the case, they are WAY past that time frame as we signed the "project completion" paperwork almost a year ago, probably about 9-10 months ago to be more exact (we signed this prior to the issue with the hardwood floors arising and we thought that they were going to replace the damaged cabinets at that time). The last time they were here to do any repairs was when the project manager stopped by on his way home from work one evening in early September to apply some caulking to the kitchen tile floors where the grout was cracking and coming apart. We have been told by various individuals that minor warranty repairs due to poor workmanship on their part does not count towards extending their deadline to file a lien and that it goes by the last time actual significant work was done, and that the project manager stopping by for 15-20 minutes on his way home at the end of the day to fix something does not count as significant work.

I am literally pulling my hair out over this and am getting more and more angry with this company. I feel that they are just trying to bully/scare us into getting our mortgage company to schedule the inspection so that they can get their money without addressing any of these serious issues with their work. In fact, I just spoke with the contracting company this afternoon and the manager's exact words to me were, "I can't let this lien date pass." I KNOW that it has already passed since it has been well over 120 days since the last significant work was done, but I, of course, did not tell her that I knew this. Also, the office manager for this company asked me to call our mortgage company to grant her permission to speak with our mortgage company directly. I am NOT okay with this and neither is my husband.

Can anyone offer any advice? I am so sick of these people constantly bullying and harassing me and leaving notes on our front door and in our mailbox (they literally left them in both places more than once) and I am not going to give into them, because they need to fix their shoddy work! Our home looks awful because of them! It's actually embarassing to even have family and friends over with the way our flooring looks and with those two hideous floor trim pieces on our kitchen cabinets covering up the damage they caused!