J D Chapman Construction

I felt that this contractor was unable to complete the job as outlined in the contract. We hired him to install a retaining wall, and he put in the equivalent of a garden wall. When I explained to him that a retaining wall is supposed to be thicker, with a larger footing he said that I hired him to put in garden walls. I therefore pulled out the contract, and I clearly showed him the words "retaining wall", along with a piece of paper from the City of Los Angeles indicating the specs for a retaining wall. He used small blocks and the footing was not commensurate with the height pursuant to the code, and was too close to the sidewalk. Our discussions were heated and miscommunication a certainty. For the driveway portion, in that we discussed the width of the rebar and thickness of the gravel and thickness of the concrete, when he wrote up the contract, we missed the fact that he downsized the rebar. When we asked him about it later, he denied the conversation where we indicated to him we wanted thicker rebar, and that the thin rebar would not be to code. He admitted later that he underbid the job and did not allow for the correct amount of concrete...in other words, he needed to charge us more. We made several changes to the bid before the work started, and he had several opportunities to come clean with his error, however, he did not. We believe this person was dishonest. We fired the guy. We never received our deposit back and he left our house screaming "you owe me $1500" so all the neighbors could hear. Never heard from the guy again. If he was due money, he would have billed us. We just wanted the guy off our property. What a nightmare. We hired someone else to complete the project.