Is it possible to make a deal with the contractor? You will drop a report to the police about trespass and destruction of private property if they make good with the neighbor’s garage door. That seems to be the neighborly thing to do.
That seems like a bit much, especially if the neighbor did make the mistake.
If it is all on the contractor he should make good without a threat.
Still really odd though that the contractor did the work with so little checking and no one home.
@StarvingButStrong - How closely does your house resemble your neighbor’s house in size, shape and color, and do you both have the same size and/or color of garage door?
We had a roofing crew show up and start tearing the roof off of our house while my wife and kids were at home. No knocking on the door, just ladders up to the roof and start work.
My wife heard them on the roof and called me to ask if I knew why people were on our roof (and of course I didn’t).
Turns out, their boss had texted the wrong address. Same house number but the correct house was on “Illinois Street” instead of “State Street”.
They immediately replaced the shingles removed. Then paid for one of their sub-contractors to replace the outer pane of glass in one of our windows to make up for their mistake (the window had been broken for some time and had nothing to do with their actions).
After checking with several carpenters I know, it seems that it is pretty common to work at a project with no one around as long as the address is on the paperwork.
IANAL, but it does seem to me that you are being way too nice.
Yes, this should be a matter for the police. Why? Forget about the new door…the contractor removed and disposed of your garage door without authorization. And he came on your property without your authorization to do it. There should absolutely be a police report about this high-dollar incident of what is essentially vandalism. (I’m guessing that the value of the loss of your garage door is actually greater than what might be allowed in small claims.)
Once that is taken care of, then you can turn to your options to be “made whole.” If the replacement door is satisfactory to you, great. You can come to an agreement with the contractor and accept it. Don’t like the door? Ask for the money to replace it with one you like. Either way, it’s the contractor’s responsibility to satisfy you and get released. Don’t worry about his financial situation or your neighbor’s, though I guess it’s possible you could include the neighbor in your action if you believe he was negligent.
Nothing was done intentionally and the OP is better off than when he started. There are no damages, and the value of the old door was close to $0.00. Check the ads for 55 year old garage doors and tell me what you find. The contractor, knowingly or not, fixed all the problems he created.
He’s more than whole now. He had a worthless garage door before and now he’s got a brand new one. Nothing else happened to him, there are no other damages. This all worked out to his benefit. It would be a huge mistake to get involved with the police or anyone else in this matter, it can only go downhill from this point for the OP.
I agree. Pretend we live all live in a small town and know each other. Mistakes happen. We give our neighbors (and local tradesmen) the opportunity to fix it. there have been some good suggestions in this thread about solutions to the problem. I don’t get the nuclear options of police/lawsuits. No one acted with malice here, or engaged in fraud. Someone made a mistake. How would we like to be treated if we were that neighbor, or that contractor?
You shouldn’t pay a penny. The fault lies 100% with the contractor who screwed up. He needs to install the new door for the neighbor and eat the cost of his own mistake. Too bad for him. He should have double checked he was at the correct address if no one was there to actually OK the job. I find it really disturbing that he was even able to do all that work with the homeowner not even being there. He just entered your home without your permission and with no one there.
Heh. There’s a contractor we’ve used for several jobs. He put on a new roof, extended the roof to cover a large porch, replaced our windows and siding, as well as some small jobs. We’ve gotten to know him.
When he did the window replacements, one of the screens came with a defect. He apologized and reordered the screen, but there were delays with the manufacturer and months flew by.
When the new screen came he brought it over to our house, but we were at work (pre-pandemic). Instead of leaving the screen on the porch, he walked right in and installed it. No big deal, but a tiny bit creepy, anyway. I laid down on our bed, which my gf had made that morning. When she got home I told her Paul brought the screen over and installed it while we were at work. She thought it weird. Then I pointed out that he apparently took a nap on our bed. She was so shocked I immediately confessed.
I agree that the starting position should be non-antagonistic. But where it goes from there depends on the contractor’s attitude - which should be nothing but humble pie, ensuring that OP is fully okay with the outcome, certainly not suggesting or implying that OP should pay anything at all. And this is not any kind of 3-way negotiation between OP, neighbor & contractor. Whatever transpired between neighbor and contractor is not OP’s concern. It’s entirely down to the contractor to resolve the situation with OP to OP’s satisfaction.
There seems to be a genuine issue about the color not matching the rest of the trim on the house. I’d say that needs to be resolved to OP’s satisfaction, and not at his expense. OP may decide that he’s far enough “ahead” with a brand new door that he’s okay with a suboptimal color, but that’s his subjective call, and I think it would be perfectly reasonable for him to decide he’s genuinely not happy with the color and to require the contractor to rectify that.
A bit of an aside but I think a lot of states have raised their small claims limits up to like $10,000, I do not think this matter is anywhere close to the point where anyone should be going to court, but it likely would be eligible for adjudication in small claims court in most states.
The obvious approach is to get things to your satisfaction from the contractor, if your satisfaction means you’re fine as it is right now and you’re okay taking on the expense and effort of repainting the door, that’s just fine. Only you get to decide where you feel like this should end up for you. I think it is fully within standards of being reasonable and definitely within your rights to reach out to the contractor though to try to put the issue of fixing the color onto him and not you. If he isn’t agreeable it’s then your call if you wish to go in more adversarial directions with it.
I have to disagree, TriPolar. One could argue whether it was intentional or not, but it wasn’t due to some sort of unavoidable accident.
Forget about the garage door. What if someone destroyed your car that was sitting in your driveway and put another one in its place? Your immediate complaint would be, of course, that someone destroyed your car. You need to address that and a police report would be appropriate. Then, and only then, should you move on to the question of whether or not the replacement car offered has made you “whole.”
As far as the value of the old garage door, it may have been a cheap door, but the replacement value (and we are not yet considering what has been offered or installed to replace it) would be considerable and probably well over $1000. The replacement cost is what was lost because of the contractor’s actions. After all, consider the situation where a good garage door might have been replaced with a crappy one. There would be a valid argument that the value of the cheap replacement is unacceptable when compared to the loss of the older door. The situation isn’t just that there was some kind of door swap, it’s whether the compensation (in the form of a new door and installation) is acceptable to the homeowner in compensation for the real loss of the old door.
BTW, I just spoke with a friend of min who is a contractor and he said, “The homeowner has the potential for a real problem. If the contractor acted in good faith and installed a new garage door, he expects to get paid for it. If neither party pays him, he could file a lien against the homeowner for work and materials, as with a mechanic’s lien.” He is not a lawyer, of course, but he has been in the business for many years and has seen situations similar to this. He pointed out that it would probably be easy to obtain a lien based on the order the contractor worked from. Actually resolving the problem might take several lawyers a significant amount of time, even if the homeowner ends up keeping the new garage door at no cost.
He also said that his insurance company would probably require him to make a good faith effort to reclaim the new door, or at least try to replace it with a cheaper one, arguing that the original door was a piece of crap and that the homeowner should be happy with the cheapest possibile replacement.
Sure, he does deserve the color he wants. However, in this case he should spend the money on the paint himself and avoid complications from trying to get the contractor to pay for it. His call though. Hardly seems worth the effort to make the contractor come out and paint it to me.
Let’s say the OP had come home after the break in and the destruction of the door, but before the new door had been installed. If the perps had offered to install a new door in the wrong color in exchange for the OP not calling in the police should the deal have been taken?
If someone totally unintentionally but for a good reason other than the wrong address destroyed my old car and replaced it with a brand new one of a similar model then I might talk to the police to make sure there wasn’t more to it, but I would not agree to pressing charges against someone for providing me with a windfall. I welcome anyone to replace any of my cars with a brand new one. I will even deal with the color myself because this would be such an enormous boon. I welcome anyone to come to my property and replace any one of my cars with a brand new similar car. I don’t care what you do with the old one destroy it, drive it, park it in your living room if you like.
That makes no sense. Replacement value is what the OP gained, not lost. There is nothing lost in this case except the color of the door which costs little to change in comparison to the difference in value between the new and the old door. The OP gained. Again, I advise him to take care of the color himself before he ends up paying far more for a lawyer than a can of paint costs.
The beneficiary can be on the hook, depending on the circumstances. If you are thinking of not paying at all, you should consult a lawyer.
This seems like a good direction to negotiate in. You move up the timing of your door replacement because you’re getting a really good deal, and the contractor and neighbor fight it out about whether neighbor owes more money, but without you in the middle of it.
Filing a police report is so disproportionate everyone concerned (the police, the neighbor, the contractor would correctly think you’re completely unhinged). Vandalism is typically defined as a willful destruction of property. You’d be filing the report knowing that the contractor did not set out to deliberately damage a strangers home. I don’t know if that’s technically a false police report but it sure seems like the spirit of one to me.
I agree with the posters who base their next move on the contractors response. If I were the contractor I’d work to replace the door with a less fancy color matching door and move the fancy door to the neighbors house. They’re out a door no matter what, may as well leave everyone with good impression of your business. I’d even volunteer to do any painting required to make the trim look good around the door. Just eat the loss with an embarrassed smile and make everyone concerned satisfied with the end result; there’s an easy path to making everyone pleased that they interacted with you, even by your mistake. I’d also make sure that all the paperwork leaves the homeowner in a “safe” state (e.g. ensure there’s no outstanding tax hit for the effectively free “gift” [not sure if that’s a thing, but it seems plausible to me], give proper receipts and proof that the contractor can’t file a lien, etc.)
If the contractor did that I wouldn’t even hold the original mistake against them. The implication in proactively making sure everyone is satisfied is that this really is a fluke accident that they’re not in the habit of making on a regular basis; they understand the seriousness of the situation. I’d have a fair amount of confidence that they’re the sort of folks who’d correct their processes to make it less likely to happen again. A contractor who tried to blow the situation off or make it hard to get resolution would give the impression that mistakes and shoddy and careless work was the norm.
Contractors starting work on your home when you’re not around isn’t that unusual to me. I’ve had roofers and solar installers come very close to that. In some cases actually doing that, in others just sending me an FYI email that they’ll be around today. But I did know that they’d do that going in. If they were careless and started work on the wrong house that’d be on them. It makes sense for roofers: the contractors put you in their queue which moves at a variable pace due to weather and jump on a nice series of days to knock out the work.
OP’s facts do not fit the concept of unjust enrichment. In fact, this exact scenario is cited in the article below as an archetypal example of when the concept of unjust enrichment does not apply.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/unjust_enrichment
choice principle
The plaintiff cannot confer a benefit upon the defendant without giving the defendant the choice to reject the benefit, and then expect something in return from the defendant
[example:] The plaintiff cannot paint the defendant’s house in the middle of the night when defendant is sleeping, and then expect the defendant to pay the plaintiff for the plaintiff’s efforts (assuming that the two parties had not contracted for this service to be performed at this time).
IANAL, but I’ve encountered the principle of unjust enrichment in medical care, where it the legal basis to pursue a patient for payment for medical care (often in emergency cases) where there is no clear formal contractual arrangement in place prior to treatment.