Performance Contracting & Home Improvement

The company is based in Lacon. My summer house on the Illinois River had been built in sections in the 1950s. I decided to gut it. I had done some of the gutting myself. While I was gutting it, I discussed it with this guy, John, who suggested I take the old roof off and raise it, using different kinds of rafters. We did that. The problems started when we found out that one of the existing exterior walls was no good, and needed to be replaced. That let to replacing just about everything else. One day when I was there, we had one wall up, and the rest of it was a slab. We started out wanting to take all the inside out, and build just a simple bath. I wanted to leave the structural part alone, instead of redoing it. Instead of 1950s knotty pine, I thought I’d use plaster board, and other stuff. He couldn’t visualize the whole thing. I gave him very detailed instructions, and he gave me some trouble about some of it, and the pricing kept changing on me. While the pricing was a problem, and I knew it was going to turn out to be a rip-off, the money he stole from me was still cheaper than a lot of people could have done it for. That wasn’t the problem. The real problem, in retrospect, was that he only knew how to do about 75% of the electrical work I needed. He only knew about 50% of the plumbing, and he had no idea how to finish from scratch. I’ve had a number of other workers in there since then, and they told me the structural stuff was fine. Even the roof he built was okay until recently when it started blowing off in places, because he didn’t do the job correctly. He probably was more used to doing small bathroom and kitchen remodeling jobs. This job was way above his head. In the first place, he walked off the job with money even though he didn’t deliver. It was a terrible story all around. Some of the work he did might even be dangerous. I’ve had to rewire some of the things that were botched. It’s been a horrendous situation. A year later, I’ve finally managed to get it fixed. Two months into the job, I found out that he has an F rating with the Better Business Bureau. I tried to handle the problem, and I had enough money to do so, but he just walked off the job. The main problem, I think, is that he just didn’t know what he was doing. There are a couple of things he might be able to do, but they don’t fit together on any sizeable job. A month or six weeks after he walked off the job, I fired him. In the meantime, I had to pull down the one wall that was standing. He had never capped it off, so it took water all of last year in the Spring, when we had record rainfall in the Peoria area. It takes three or four pages just to describe all that was wrong. I’ve summarized it a couple of times, on Angie’s List, but my comments never registered on the website. I tried to be charitable in my comments, and not go overboard. I found that the website asks me very specific questions about contractors, but I can’t enter something the other way around, where I enter the name of the contractor, and can fill in comments. I paid him $60,000, and I got about $50,000 worth of work. I had to spend about another $15,000 to complete the project.