Hello All,
Apologise for my lengthy post. I live in NJ. Myself and 4 of my neighbors wanted to finish our unfinish basements. We hired a contractor who gave us a quote of $8000.00 for each basement as a base price. Additions such as bathroom, wet bar is extra. Base price included framing, fireproofing the ceiling, waterproofing the walls, sheetrock, painting, electrical and carpeting. He promised to complete the work by May end and started the work in 2nd week of March. He was not a licensed contractor and he resides in Philadelphia. For each stage we paid him in advance in full. For each house he took 2 to 3 weeks to finish the framing work. He was iregular and we had to call him several times. He was doing this as a part-time business. He was working with another company as a fulltime. After framing he was supposed to start electrical, but he didn't and took money from us for electrical. As per our verbal agreement he was supposed to help us with getting the township approval(making the diagrams etc). But he did not do that. He gave us some pictures but they were wrong. Four of us paid $3800 each and another person paid $4700 totalling $19,900. With all these money he just vanished. He doesn't answer our phone calls, no word from him. It is middle of July now and our basements look terrible. We wanted to take some sort of legal action against him and get our money back. He basically cheated us. I will be contacting a lawyer for this. But mean while I was wondering where to start from, what can we do. If we go to the court are we strong(we don't have a formal written contract with him). Any advise or people who had similar experiences please share your valuable thoughts
Thanks much for your inputs
-Kumar