NB Home Improvements LLC

Summary: Project started pretty well but ended up really badly where we got lawyer involved and I am in the process of suing Nick for taking money but not completing the work. Let me elaborate When we met Nick in Millburn in Sept 2018, we shook hands and verbally agreed on the scope of work and the monies to be paid. The contract that was sent to us to get executed lacked bunch of stuff that we agreed upon earlier. Although we continued to go back and forth on getting everything in the contract as we discussed when we shook hands, Nick and his sub-contractors started the work at the site. I started paying him for what he asked for. Nick continued the work until March without an executed contract since since we continued to go back and forth on putting right scope of the project. Up until then I had paid him close to $260K. Framing was up with boarding. No insulation was done. Rough plumbing, electric, hvac was done as well. At this point, Nick decided to completely walk away since we did not have an executed contract. He essentially made a demand of adding ~$50K to the agreed upon number in order to continue. We explored option to hire another contractor but everyone were reluctant to take on any liability. We had no other choice but to agree on new amount. We ended up executing the contract. The work resumed. We soon realized that the payment milestone put in the contract was very unreasonable where it was front loaded quite a bit. We moved on. A month later, Nick again stopped the work and pulled all his sub-contractors due to some unreasonable change orders. I hired a lawyer to amicably resolve it. After 3 weeks of no work, the contractors came back and started work again. We were living in a rental place and the lease was getting over which caused a ton of stress. Fast forward, Nick has now completely walked away. Resolving this amicably is not an option any more. I have paid him everything as per the contract less $10,000. The work that is remaining is worth easily ~$30,000. I am now in process of filing a special civil part in NJ courts to recoupe $15K from Nick. Overall the emotional stress we went through was too much and the experience of building a dream home was severely destroyed by Nick's behavior which was unacceptable at best. To date he has taken the money and has not delivered the work as per the contract. He is a bully and will take all available short cuts to get his way. He has walked off the job 3 times and we had to hire a lawyer to get him back to work. Long story short, We regret hiring him and advise anyone against it. He made our experience of building our dream miserable. He makes all the promises on and off the contract and never fulfills it. His word has no meaning.