First of all, I’ve now paid the guy. He was insistent that I pay him yesterday after completion of the fixes. In fact, he threw another fit when I didn’t have a check ready for him yesterday morning. I told him that I didn’t know he was coming yesterday, that I didn’t have our checkbook, and that I wasn’t paying him anyway until my wife had a look at the walk as well. His proposal did say that payment was “due upon completion,” but his invoice also said that no interest would accrue until after 30 days.
In any event, my wife looked at it last night, and we decided that this was about the best we were going to be able to do with this guy. He fixed the two most egregious defects, and there was no way we were going to get him to redo the whole walk at this point.
After he called me on my home phone and cell phone repeatedly last night, I paid him the balance by credit card.
In response to the last few posts:
- The contractor did spraypaint out a layout. The thing is, he sprayed out some lines, smudged them out, sprayed some more, and basically ended up with lines everywhere. Then he said not to worry about it, because the excavator crew were going to dig out a foot past the lines anyway, and that the walk would be more carefully laid out once they had the subbase installed.
Following this, I did indeed lay out hoses, and sprayed out a constant-width walk in a different color. My orange lines stood out from his pink lines, and were intended to highlight what the outcome of our pre-construction discussion was.
I even took pictures of the sprayed-out layout. If you’re curious you can see them here.
Again, the point of these lines was to serve as a “rough-draft” layout, according to the contractor. I’m not sure that these photos help me out a lot, since I don’t think the final walk differed radically from the sprayed-out layout. The discrepancies, while bothersome, include stuff like the fact that they shifted the right-most point of the S-curve a few feet too far toward the front steps.
- The first three days of work consisted of excavating the topsoil for both the patio and front walk, installing the subbase for both areas, and installing the pavers on the back patio. The front walk was only laid out and installed on the fourth day. No, they did not box out anything. Unfortunately, the day they ended up doing the front walk was a day when I absolutely could not stay home to observe the work, and I couldn’t exactly ask the contractor to suspend work since they had all of their equipment and materials out there. It wasn’t as if I could have said something sooner about the front walk–there was nothing to look at that morning but subbase material–and they were done by the afternoon.
I do appreciate everyone’s comments in this thread, BTW. At least the contractor did come back out to the job. If he hadn’t, I would have followed some of the advice people made here. Based on this contractor’s behavior throughout this job, my wife insists that we should still file a complaint with the BBB and the builder’s association.