Panaggio Electric Co

Joe Panaggio had done multiple jobs for my parents over the years going back to 1990 when my family moved to Newton and bought a house there. It seemed like a no-brainer to ask Joe to do the work on my house when I bought a place in Somerville. Since I had never done any major remodeling projects on my own, I got a few quotes and asked Joe to come and offer a proposal. His quote of $6000 was right in the middle of the other quotes we got, so we asked him to do the work. He came and did the rough electrical work over the course of a couple days. I gave him half the money up front and then another $2500 when the rough electrical was "completed". When it came time to get the work inspected, Joe stopped returning our phone calls. Talking with the Somerville inspectors, they had never heard of Joe and he had never pulled a permit to do the rough work. We called Joe multiple times over the next few weeks trying to get him to respond. We finally sent him a registered letter detailing our complaints and asking him to contact us to resolve them, and the letter was refused. In the end, I had to get another contractor to pull a permit and complete the work. Since he had me over a barrel, this second contractor billed us hourly to complete the job and nickel and dimed us over every little thing that Joe left undone. The $6000 job ended up costing close to $10000. The Somerville inspector insisted on seeing the rough work that Joe had done before letting the new contractor pull a permit, and he wrote up a punch list of failed items. None of the rough wiring was actually pulled to the panel; Joe had just drilled holes and dropped pigtails down into the crawl space. He skipped outlets that we had marked out on the studs, forgot a switch box for the external lights, etc. I guess I should have sued him, but I'm not really a confrontational person. In the end I guess he did about $3000 of actual work.