BLU DIAMOND CONCRETE

I am building a 40x60 shop. I received a bid and chose to go with Neil Samoy with "Blu Diamond Concrete" located in great falls to do my concrete footings and concrete walls. The land in which the shop was to be built is on somewhat of a hillside, so I hired someone else to excavate into the hillside 70 feet so we could set up the concrete forms. The hillside is all the same grade of slope. When Neil and I first met on the land to decide how tall the wall in the back of the shop was going to have to be, he got on one knee and "eyeballed" the slope of the land and said "a four foot wall in the back should be plenty". I was impressed that it was possible for someone to be able to judge the grade of the land off the cuff and come up with such a number without a "transit". The job bid included footings, walls (at 4 feet tall), all rebar, backfilling the foundation with dirt, setting forms, j-bolts, installing gravel and compacting and the 4" concrete slab inside the shop all for a price of $20,000.00, and I agreed. Once my excavator was done digging and said it was ready for footings to be formed up I called Neil up and told him we were ready. Neil required that I pay him half of the money down to get started, so I let him get a check for the amount of $10,000. When he came out to the land and looked at the excavation work, he was surprised to find that an 8 foot wall would be required to obtain some type of protrusion above ground level for backfilling purposes, and that it was going to cost me more money in concrete, rebar, forms and labor. When I asked him how much, he said that he would be able to do all of the walls and a little bit of the slab for the original price of $20,000.00. So I agreed and again we pressed on with the job. He got the footings formed up and poured with no problems. Soon after, Neil was forming up and pouring the walls. The day after the concrete was poured in the walls, I went out to the job site to inspect all of the work that was done. What I found was when the concrete was poured, some of the forms "let go" and the concrete pushed outward which left me with uneven walls on both of the 60 foot length inside walls and on one side of the outside front wall. I consulted with the owner of "Sky Blu Foundations" and he came out to assess the situation as well. He said "you have the right to have him fix what you do not like, or you can fire him from the job right now". When I called Neil on the phone to talk with him about the walls being uneven and unleveled. He said that he thought it was an excellent job and that he "was not going to re-do any of it". I said that I would like for him to take the rest of his forms and leave my land and I would contract someone else to pour my floor for me. He said "fine". When Richard Azure and I totaled up all of the materials used up to this point, we came to approximately $4800.00. Which means he received $5200.00 in labor. He is demanding the remaining $10,000.00 and refuses to finish