Sued By Contractor With Very General Scope And Big Bill Close To Completion

Location: Florida

Edited to correct: it is actually a contractors lien, which would be on our property for a year if I’m reading local regs correctly. It didn’t include any dollar amount for claimed missing/short payment, but did list a bunch of work that either wasn’t done at all or should be included in the general scope of work we agreed to. Sorry for confusion, I was hearing this second hand when I made the post.

Have been going back and forth with our contractor that we hired (and have already paid in full according to the contract) to fully redo our bathroom and also some of our bedroom. We picked this guy because he came very highly recommended and the entire (verbal) discussion and agreement was that the contract was the contract, and that we didn’t want any surprise bills at the end. We were clear with our plans and desires, we bought basically everything except the small things like tools and screws. Flooring, fixtures, fans, all supplied by us, including the overages from all the wasted materials.

The contract we signed was very basic, a list of jobs done (replace tub, redo flooring, Etc) with a total at the bottom. We had LOTS of issues during the job that he claimed would take 4-6 weeks and has/had taken 3 months, and still isn’t complete. He started a couple weeks late, day one his dumpster dropoff drove into our neighbors yard, leaving ruts and causing a (n admittedly overblown) scandal with our new neighbor. He installed our bedroom floors incorrectly but claimed it was how all his customers prefer it and is a more high scale pattern. Tons of little quality issues that we’ve had to point out. But, to his credit, it functions, and seems to be mostly done to a point where you have to look to notice things, I’m not saying the bathroom is falling apart, more so that we have long term issues and questions about things like plumbing and flooring (which are expensive to fix if/when they go bad).

So, right as there is a sort of last visit to put in some glass and call the job done, he sends a text saying that there is the matter of us paying his ‘overages’ that amounted to about 1/3 the total cost (thousands of dollars). And, the list is almost all things that were already agreed on or should be including in the scope. He quoted like $1000 to oil our floors, which is part of the install process (that he tried to use a different brand oil that was against the install directions and totally different look that we wanted) and even went to far as claiming the oil we wanted wasn’t available, so we went out and bought it ourselves. He also had line items for things like ‘expertise’ because he claimed that things we asked for were more difficult to do. One of the examples he used was our exhaust fan that was one big fan in the attic, ducted to both the water closet and over shower, with a single vent up. I’m no contractor, but I thought that would almost be easier to have a single unit with a single switch than installing 2 separate.

Anyways, I could complain about this all day. We were just trying to be done and move on. We adamantly objected to the charges, but offered a small sum to basically say ‘come do the last step and be done.’ I believe that lawsuits would be governed by the contract (or lack thereof) signed. Since our contract is extremely broad and general, I don’t think he’d have any legal grounds to pursue us for more money without addendums or other prior agreement. Again, he NEVER mentioned any extras or difficulties or anything of the sort, it was all ‘no problem’ during the work and we didn’t add/change anything. I think we COULD have pursued him for screwing up the floors and try to get him to pay us to have the floors redone to spec, but we honestly didn’t want the headache and wanted to just be done.

Obviously, we plan to reach out for a consult to see what a professional thinks, but I’d like to at least calm my nerves by hopefully hear internet professionals tell me I have nothing to worry about. Thanks in advance and I’ll save everyone the hassle by saying lesson learned to not have a more specific scope of work signed. I would have sworn that we did have something much more specific, but it must have been a different quote that we’d gotten.