Suburban Construction

We really hate the company. They were given to us by an architect. The overall quality of the sub-contractors the owner used was insufficient. A lot of the work was not done well and he was not around to supervise. That was the problem. It was a very large job and some of it is okay but some of it was poorly done. He undersized the air-conditioning system and we had to fight with him for months to get him to put in an additional zone compressor and whatever they do. The house now has three zones. He only put in two. It was always warm and we got the architect back involved who said it did need three zones. He fought us like crazy and finally agreed to put one in at his own cost. Then we noticed that we had a lot of water inside the walls and we wondered what was up. It was because the master bath had tiling that was put in incorrectly so every time we showered it was going not only into the walls but into the foundation of the house. We immediately found out the name of someone who was good at that, a master tile-man who must have been 60, and he said he had never seen anything done so badly. We hired him. He was semi-retired and not a guy who was hungry for anything. He did the work with his assistant and it took him probably a month and he did it very properly and it was $12000 which we attempted to collect from the remodeling company. The owner wasn't willing to pay and said that he could have done it cheaper. He would have been the last person we would have turned to to repair it. We had to go to arbitration, filing arbitration with the arbitration association, and that cost us about $5000. We went after 12000 but we got 6000. The company never paid and we have gone after him ourselves trying to get a judgment against him by a court which we did and the court in effect said he had to pay and he still hasn't paid. So we are deciding whether to hire a company that goes after people like that and they would keep half or go after him ourselves. The remodeling company probably thinks that we won't go after them because it is too much work and they are right. I have been to the county courthouse several times. It was a kind of a nightmare. It was terrible. He never apologized. He accepted that the work was sub-standard. But his argument was that he could have done the work for 3000 bucks. That was the problem originally because he took low bidders and they were not good.

We had to rebuild an entire bathroom that was built improperly. We went to arbitration and won. After that we went to court and the arbitration was turned into a judgment. He is now in default of the judgment.