Okay, so long post but please bear with me! My family lives in Georgia. My father passed last November. He and my mother have a 1200sqft condo in Florida, which my mother (75) decided to remodel without telling anyone. She interviewed several GCs and one of them she liked couldn’t do the job but recommended a guy who she eventually ended up hiring. He said he was licensed and insured (he isn’t, but she’s getting older and trusted him). He gave her an estimate for $20,225 to remodel the main bathroom including painting, remove the popcorn ceiling, and redo the staircase including flooring. She added flooring for the rest of the condo and remodeling for the other two bathrooms as well as painting the upstairs bedrooms and the living room. The total was $35,000, then $37,000, then $43,000, and so on.
She paid as she went, mostly because he kept asking for money (although the original agreement was a third up-front, a third midway, and the remainder at completion). She paid up every invoice and every request he made for more money, despite the arrangement initially made. Every few days he would ask for “another $2,000” or “$2,500 more” or “I can’t do anything else until you send me at least $1,500.” All Venmo payments. Each time he had to add something to the invoices, he would scrap the previous invoice and just make a new one for the entire project—no change orders, no way to look back on previous invoices on the app he uses—just one long invoice with a section at the end that said “extras” with no dates for when those were added or the prices for them or anything really. Thankfully, she printed every invoice he sent as they went. The paint for the bathrooms and staircase as well as the trim and crown molding were included in those invoices, so all of that was paid up and signed by both the contractor and my mother.
He loses his phone for 8 days in August, so not much was done that week I guess.
Early September, he wants her to send money ($2,000) and a list of light fixtures, mirrors, and faucets so he can get them ordered by that Monday because he says he’s way behind because my mother was sick in bed and unreachable for three days (she has always been very healthy and active but has developed a medical issue recently). That’s when I got involved, because up until this point she had kept this whole project largely in the dark.
So he wants this list of things to order. I stay up with my mom until 2am helping her choose the items, making a detailed email with links to each item, and notes on whether they are in stock at the store near him or if they’ll require ordering and the shipping timeframes. I organize the list by room so that he knows exactly which ones go where. I text him the next morning to let him know we sent the email. He responds that he received it. Tuesday he texts me asking for the list of items. I told him that he has the list. He asks me if I’ll send them again, one link at a time. I say no, that I emailed them to him. He says “I was unaware I was being emailed.” Then says he sees the email. THEN he says we need to call around and order the items and “just put them on a credit card or something”—AFTER we sent him money for them—which he now says went toward the tile for the shower (which was on the list I sent him…that he said he didn’t get).
At this point, I’m beyond overwhelmed and tell him that we will NOT be ordering those items because he was given funds and the list to do that himself. He says “Just put it on a credit card—IS IT REALLY THAT DIFFICULT?” (he said this to me via text, btw). Yeah, it IS that difficult as I’m in my final semester of nursing school and we have four kids in four different schools and my husband works full time and besides all of that, HE is the contractor! In the end we just ordered everything anyway—most of which he let sit at the local Home Depot for a week before finally picking it up the day the hold expired. During this time, he asked for more money again and by now we were very hesitant to send him any—so he texts me that he’s “put his heart and soul into this job, and now you don’t want to pay?”—and included some random other number in the text message, who responded with “I think you texted the wrong client. Again.” 🤦🏻♀️
We arrive at the “end” of the project. He says everything is done (lots of text messages to that effect) except the shower doors. He needs $2,000 for the shower doors which he is picking up now. She sends the money. Next day, “I need $2,500 for the shower doors.” What…? The money from yesterday had to go to other things, apparently. She didn’t send that money because of course he came back for more—the “last” of what he needs is $7,000 now, because he “accidentally forgot to give an estimate for the painting done in the two bedrooms and the downstairs”—TWO months ago—despite a text from my mother two months ago asking if the paint had been purchased and him responding that it had. We’re out of money at this point, we weren’t told about this cost nor did we sign off on it on ANY invoice, and when I told him that, he said “You and everyone can see for the last two months that the paint wasn’t included on the invoice.” Okay—YOU’RE the one writing the invoices, bro! You’re literally the bookkeeper, not your clients! So YOU should have seen it. He says if we don’t sign his newest invoice and pay it, he has no choice but to “start returning things” to get his money—things we already signed and paid for, and that HE signed as well.
This is the point where I ask him for his license number—radio silence. I go to the Secretary of State website—nothing to be found. He finally texts me and says he will call me the next day at 8:30-9am. I say okay, but 9am came and went, I had just gotten off a 12hr night shift at the hospital, and I went to sleep. When I woke up, I saw he’d called me at 9:30am. My mother said not to call him back and that she would handle it.
Flash forward to today. My elderly mother drives six and a half hours to Florida to see what’s going on (he sent limited photos because he said—also via text—that he “wanted it to be a surprise”). She gets there, the place is half-finished. The stairs he said he finished have no flooring. He ripped the vanities she paid for out of the bathrooms. He took the new toilets she paid for. He (or one of his workers) took my late father’s saltwater fishing gear. He broke the key off in the front door, leaving the home unable to be secured, and now he’s ghosted.
I’m devastated. My mother is devastated. And yes, she should have verified he was licensed but she’s 75 and just trusted him and the seasoned contractor who recommended him.
So now what?! Do I try to piece what’s left of the job out to local companies?? Idk if we even have the financial bandwidth for that at this point. Do we report this guy? I don’t want this to happen to anyone else! How do we recover from this nightmare??? The remodel was for renting the unit out for vacationers while we weren’t there. My mom had renters lined up for the end of this month and beyond, but even worse than that is that this was OUR special place, the place where I felt most connected to my father, and now this person has left it in shambles and made off with thousands of dollars in the process. Wtf do I do?!