Last March we hired a guy to dig up under our deck and place weed control down with rocks to help with landscaping and rabbits. We were finding dead bunnies under our deck daily (sometimes 5 a day) and that does not go well with me or our dogs. Our dogs were playing with them and the last straw was when I was in the back with our 2 year old at the time playing when a dead bunny appeared. I screamed and in turn scared Josiah to death. Originally we hired Don to do the under part of the deck. Well, he came up with this plan (an idea we had been thinking about doing for a while). We have an area in our back yard that would be great for a patio and the people who owned the house before us just put some flag stones down and allowed the grass to grow in between. We had been wanting to concrete it in for a while and make it more useful. Well, Don said he could do it. Very long story short, he did a shady job using brick mortar instead of concrete...the foundation moves under your feet...our 40lb dog's foot went through it after it was completed and you can pick up the flag stones because they are not cemented in. It was overall the worst job I have ever seen. He was supposed to dig up the foundation, make it level and take care of the grass and weeds so that they would be gone forever. Almost immediately we had grass growing up through the concrete!! It is done so terribly that our 2 year old (now 3 year old) could pick up the concrete. Surely that is not supposed to be able to be done...let alone by a toddler.
After talking with some other workers in that field of work and having them come out to give us an estimate of fixing it, we decided to take Don to small claims court without a lawyer. We had pictures, phone records of times that he never called us back, his contract stating he would complete the job, etc. we had our act together. (by the way, the day he "finished" the job he said he would be back to check on the foundation that weekend to make sure it was drying correctly...did he ever come? NOPE...did he return any of our phone calls? NO....did he cash our check immediately?...YES! We pay our court fees (taking him to court originally was to make sure he didn't do this to someone else in town) and show up to represent ourselves because we didn't want to pay for a lawyer. Don never shows, but had hired a lawyer the day before our court date. The lawyer he hired knew nothing of the situation and came in saying that they only thing Don told him was that he would come back to our property and fix it. NO WAY...are you kidding me? We gave you more than an opportunity to fix what you had done wrong and we didn't want him back in our yard. His "lawyer" saw our pictures, our phone records and all that we had come prepared with and said "clearly, I am representing the wrong party here." lol So, we then had to set a court date for a trial that involved us needing a lawyer. We got an excellent lawyer and our court date came. Guess what? Shady Don did't show up and didn't have a lawyer to represent him either. The judge obviously found us to be correct in our story and in the state of TN you can get extra for Lying and Deceptive Work. We didn't want more..in fact what the judge came to is far more than we would ever expect someone to pay. We just want it fixed..so we want the amount of money it would take to fix it. We aren't doing this to make money on the guy. We aren't trying to screw him over - we just want it made right.
(I have even more pictures of us being able to lift the flag stones out of the middle and the giant hole in the middle of it, but they are on a different computer that isn't working.)
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