Guest Author - Katie Murphy

This is a continuation of my last article on the topic of home improvements. To pick up where we left off… we had just found out the company with whom we contracted had not applied for a permit from the County, but they had informed us the County would not allow them to do our patio expansion, reportedly, because the codes had changed.

As soon as we leave the County planners’ office we call the contractor to try to find out what the heck is going on. We are told the contractor had talked to a planner, informally, and were told they could not marry the new structure to an old structure due to the code changes.

We asked this question: If we wanted to add a room to our home, would the county deny the permit because the codes had changed since the home had been built? Of course not, but we may have to make some improvements along with the addition.

At this point, the contractor acknowledged they should have followed-up on the permit with the County rather than tell us it could not be done. Okay, we’re willing to give them a second chance. We agree to give them a week to get the drawings from their engineer, run the drawings by us, and apply for the permit. The contractor agrees to the timeframe.

The week goes by and no word from my new friend, turned ex-friend. Pick up the phone for another disappointing call. This time we speak to one of the other owners of the company. He tries to blame it on the engineers by explaining to us the engineers are independent and they have no control over them.

We’ve had enough. No more excuses. It’s Tuesday and we ask when he will be sending our $1000 deposit. He tells us it will be in the mail on Friday. We won’t hold our breath.
On Friday, we head out for vacation. We’ll wait until we get back in a week to deal with our patio expansion.

We are rapidly heading toward the summer play months and, we are months into what we thought would be a project near completion by now, but we haven’t had the first shovel of dirt moved yet.

To our amazement, the deposit was in our mailbox when we returned home from vacation. We are no longer excited about our new playground, but we still want it done. It’s hard to be energized when we will have to pay at least $5000 more with a new contractor to have the job done.

I guess, in a way, we are lucky. We lost time and were disappointed, but we didn’t lose any money or have a job started, but incomplete. We thought we were cautious. We thought we did our homework. We thought we would be done by now.

Chalk it up to a life lesson and move on. Maybe by the fall I can report our patio is complete. For now, we’ll just float around aimlessly on a raft in the pool. I guess that’s not bad.