I do not think so, the contractor made a mistake, why shoudl they pay anything for the mistake?
Now the Contractor has made a fair offer- he will take the deluxe door off, install it at neighbor- then install a basic door for free on the OP. That is a very fair offer all around.
Contractor didn’t just make a mistake, he failed to reasonably safeguard himself against such mistakes, and didn’t insure to indemnify himself for such mistakes. Not even counting a laundry list of petty criminal charges including trespass, B&E, property damage. Contract goes to the cleaners.
Most crimes require what attorneys refer to as “mens rea,” which is Latin for a “guilty mind.” In other words, what was the defendant’s mental state and what did the defendant intend when the crime was committed. Mens rea allows the criminal justice system to differentiate between someone who did not mean to commit a crime and someone who intentionally set out to commit a crime.
The criminal element was only an asterisk to my main point, but what you say is not irrelevant. The gray area, though, is whether one takes reasonable precautions against results involving property loss or damage.
Erm, yes, I would dump it all on the contractor and I wouldn’t even think twice about it. You unwillingly got a product you didn’t even want. There’s no way you should pay for it, and your neighbor DID pay for it. So the contractor is all that’s left.
It’s been a month, just curious if y’all have been able to resolve this with the contractor.
Sorry! Once something new enters my life, it’s like everything else gets pushed down the list and eventually falls off.
Yes, the Great Garage Door Switcheroo has been completed – basically two weeks after the first installation happened. (Apparently the soonest the contractor could get the new ‘plain’ door for us, and working around other jobs he’d already contracted to do.) They started by dismantling the neighbor’s old garage door, then dismantled the ‘fancy’ one on our garage, walking each panel across the street and laying them out on the lawn temporarily,
Then two of the crew went ahead and installed the ‘plain’ door for us (apparently quite easy, as they had already taken care of any needed equipment replacement/alignment/whatever aspects when they’d put the ‘fancy’ door on two weeks earlier, so it was just a matter of sliding each panel into place and connecting the hinges between them, and then hooking up the cables and springs. Basically I’d say it took less than an hour from getting the last piece of the ‘fancy’ door off to having the ‘plain’ door installed and functional.
We paid nothing at all, btw. Everyone had pretty much acknowledged all along that we had done nothing to cause the problem. So… we’ve benefited by now having an essentially identical door to what we had before, except it’s physically much younger. Seems slightly unfair, but we’ve come out on the losing side in other matters over the years due to happenstances, so I guess we’re looking at this as karma rebalancing itself.
Meanwhile, the contractor and the other half of his crew was working on the neighbor’s garage. They apparently had to do some extra work because of some damage from when his daughter had somewhat rammed her car into the closed doors. Replaced the ‘track’ on one side completely, straightened the other and replaced some connections and support thingies and whatall on the other. The guys from ‘our’ side joined them after our door was done, and it was another hour and a bit before they had the ‘fancy’ door reinstalled.
I don’t know exactly how the finances worked out, except the neighbor did in fact pay ‘some’ extra. Sort of an acknowledgement of his ‘fault’ in signing the contract with the wrong address showing. It couldn’t of been too much (maybe a few hundred?) because Chris just grumbled a bit, he wasn’t really upset.
And I guess the contractor (or insurance) covered all the rest, basically the cost of the ‘plain’ door and the labor of his crew.
And…that’s the end of it. No police, no court case, no eternal vendettas being sworn. 
Sounds like an optimal outcome. Thanks for updating!
Good, thanks for update.
What a tale!
Did you ever figure out how they got into your garage to replace the door? I mean, I would imagine someone could basically take a sledgehammer and or hacksaw to the old door to get in - but I’m also sure they’d expect you to be home to make that part unnecessary. Doors aren’t necessarily super secure but if you have an electric opener, they aren’t super easy to open without the correctly-programmed remote, either.
Hopefully your new door, even though it looks like the old one, is improved somewhat, at least regarding insulation. When we replaced ours a few years back (new driver in family, omitted one leetle step when he was trying to go to work), we opted for one with a higher level of insulation. Better temperature control, AND I was shocked at how much it cut down on outside noise.
I think I explained upstream – basically, our garage does not give access to our house. (They’re attached to each other, there’s just no internal door from the garage to the kitchen or whatever.) Since we don’t keep anything worth stealing in the garage, and we live in a neighborhood with essentially no crime, we don’t bother locking the garage and it doesn’t have an electric opener. So all the workers had to do was grab the handle and lift to ‘break into’ it.