Fixing Someone Else's Mess

By Justin Parat

Although I specialize in wood floors and ceramic tile, my father taught me every aspect of construction from a young age so I enjoy doing all aspects of construction.

I have the benefit of working with my brother and friend Matt....both who were taught all their excellent skills and good work habits from my father!

We had a small project to do over the last couple of weeks, it involved fixing a room addition that was hacked together by someone pretending to be a contractor and ran away with the owners money. It's very important that you work with trustworthy people and this day and age it difficult to find good people to hire.

I can tell you how to avoid getting ripped off. Never hire the cheapest bid. Anyone can low ball a price....just to get a job, take a couple of payments and suddenly they don't show up anymore. I'm still pretty young and we've been on at least 10 projects that had to be fixed and involved the homeowner getting ripped off.

On this project we had to fix walls, frame roofs, take apart new framing and then try to put everything back together again so it looked good.

I can't show pictures because I don't want to embarass anyone, but I will tell you it was in Island Lake, Illinois. The project turned out great, but it took us twice as long to fix than we expected, but we honored our original price. You might say, "You messed up on the estimate." No....it's very hard to tell what needs to be done to fix something that wasn't done right the first time around, you never know what to expect.