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Our contractor left the country on vacation with the work on our house unfinished. As his departure day approached, I asked him repeatedly whether he was on schedule and he assured me that he was. He put his friend in charge to “finish up the details.” You veterans know where this is going…

His dodgy friend put in a partial day of half-ass work and left the house in shambles. He said that he was doing his friend a favor and was brought in for minor electrical work. This friend and another of our contractor’s helpers said that they had committed to one day of work and would likely not come back next week because they hadn’t been paid.

We are due to move in to the house in 5 days. Our contractor is unreachable, his workers unaccountable, and our nerves are fried. I’ve spent countless hours playing hookey from work in order to manage the contractor, and now his workers. Our landlord, employers, movers, and babysitter are all aligned around the move for next weekend.

We’ve paid for 2/3 of the work, which is about what was done. Maybe the contractor was secretly hoping that we would fire him? I’d almost prefer that over thinking that we naively trusted this guy until the day he left the country.

Today we found someone else to complete the work and fired the contractor. Since he’s MIA, we had to communicate the firing through his 2 workers. We changed the locks and took tons of pictures as evidence of the unfinished work.

Who in the forum has fired a contractor? Any lessons learned that you can share?