Cars, hurricanes, insurance, and replacements.

[hppants]

Was your GC licensed and insured?  If so, have you filed a complaint with the State licensing board?  Have you filed a Contractual Liability claim with the GC's underwriter BEFORE 4/2021 (1 year)?

This is taking entirely too long - I'm sorry you are having these problems.

 

[wfooshee]

Licensed and insured. Submitted claims to the attorney general's office and the state licensing, have not heard anything from the licensing people. Did not know I could go to their liability underwriter, but if a year is the limit on that, it's too late.

This dragged on and on because the guy WOULD answer the phone and talk to me. It's not like he took the money and ran. He would even come to the house and meet. It was always "next week" or "you're second or third on the schedule." Then it was "we lost all our people, I can't keep my help." COVID was part of that, I'm sure, but not ALL of it. Finally, the electrical actually started, and I was thinking, "YES!!! Here we go at last!"

A neighbor had the same GC, which is why I started with him. Turns out that the neighbor, while work WAS getting done, it was slow, a couple of inspections failed and things had to be redone, so he was actually very unhappy with them, even though he had way more actually done; his house is nearly complete!

Actually meeting a new GC tomorrow, and he's aware of this history.

 

[Bounce]

Those pics are shocking. I was an electricians helper for a couple of years and they'd have fired me for that.

 

[hppants]

Don't assume that your claim prescription period has passed.  The year starts when the breach happens - that can be grey.  Also, FL laws may be different on this and COVID may have some regulation that exempts this for you.

If you have their certificate of insurance, file a contract liability claim on their General Liability rider immediately.  Remember, If what happens is an insurable loss for the GC, regardless of his current status (bankruptcy, etc), then his underwriter is obligated to indemnify him and pay for your loss.  If you don't have the COI, then ask the GC for it and tell him in no uncertain terms that you are filing for breach of contract.  If the GC won't give you his COI, then you can hunt for it at the State's Insurance Commission Office.

You may also have a claim against his performance bond, if in fact he actually has one.  That's a longer row to hoe.

Of course, an attorney may be able to help you with this, but that will cost you money that you may not be able to recover.

Again, I'm terribly sorry this is taking so long.  It's unacceptable.

 

[wfooshee]

Those pics are shocking. I was an electricians helper for a couple of years and they'd have fired me for that.

Electrical pics... shocking... 

 

[wfooshee]

OK. The attorney general's office is hauling this contractor in front of a judge is a couple of weeks, and I get to go watch. I don't know anything about what will happen, but it is on a grand larceny criminal charge. Initial hearing so far, nothing about an actual trial, yet.

And I have signed (last week) with a "real" contractor, and am looking forward to getting stuff done.

Also done, in the living room, is 4 "canless" LED lamps which will mount flush in the sheetrock when that goes up. Color-temp adjustable (so I can make them look like regular indoor lights and not the ultra-white LED look) and dimmable, so I have lights in the living room, and I will say, it's nice to be able to go into the house with the lights working. They're just hanging from the Romex at the moment, but they're light enough to hang level with the floor even though the Romex goes into the side of the box on the back. Also, my motion-triggered driveway flood is a Good Thing, too! LED floodlights draw 12 watts, replacing a 300-watt incandescent bulb!

Really ready to burn this trailer to the ground!!! I have no interest in ever using a camping trailer or motor home again, for the rest of my life!!!

 

[wfooshee]

IT BEGINS!!!!!!

Building permit posted, and lockbox on the door so folks can access as needed. Windows are ordered, and a guy was in the other day measuring for insulation. Only 35 months after the storm...

And the contractor wants my trailer! Said he'd put it on his hunting property. He knows the issues with it.

 

[wfooshee]

More stuff getting done!!!! This is becoming quite exciting!

They found obvious signs of water damage on the wallboard that remained, not to mention insulation compacted where it had been wet, and pulled it all down. The interior of the house is now completely bare lumber, with hot outlets in the boxes! (I shut off the two bedrooms they were cleaning wallboard out of, as the ceiling fans and lights were still up and running.) I had to upgrade the boxes, as the existing ones are not code for fans these days. Had the wallboard stayed up I wouldn't have had to do that, but being exposed it becomes new work and has to be code. I had to move a wall outlet to another circuit, too. One of the outlets in BR3 was on BR2's circuit, easy shortcut since they were back-to-back and side-by-side on the shared wall. Nope! Can't have that any more! Used up my last scrap of 12-3 to get that outlet on BR3's circuit. Anything else electrical needs doing, I'm off to the store!

Dumpster wasn't here, yet, so... It did show up later in the day, though, and the guys got this all cleaned out the next day. House is bare inside, now, all the insulation and wallboard gone, no interiors doors remaining.

They found cracks in the tub in the master bath, so that came out, which I wasn't expecting. The toilet will have to go, too, because I'll never get a tub or shower enclosure to match the existing, perfectly serviceable, but not white, toilet.

Windows are ordered, but availability is on a lengthy timeline, perhaps not until after New Year's! Meanwhile, siding removal commences.

I mentioned earlier that I was going to pull Ethernet through the house, and I've done that, now. Master BR has three drops, including one high on a wall for behind a TV (along with an AC outlet up there,) and the other two bedrooms have two jacks each, one at TV height. I have a jack in the dining room as a just-in-case, and one in the living room where the entertainment system is going to be. All the cables run to a wall in the laundry room where I'll mount the switch. There'll be a switch at the entertainment center, too, so I can distribute Ethernet to the TV, receiver, game consoles, disc player, Internet firewall, wifi access, whatever goes up there. My house has an MDF and an IDF!!! And in the two bedrooms just stripped, I've added TV-level AC outlets next to the Ethernet jacks, all will be behind the TVs, hiding all the cables and power cords. I though about Ethernet in the garage, but if I set up a TV out there, just to have on game day or something, it'll have to be wifi-connected.

I've decided to stay with a gas water heater, tank-type. The tankless is just too expensive, needs a bigger gas line also, and being old and by myself I might not live long enough to see the ROI for that! I thought briefly about the newer heat-pump tank heater, which would actually be perfect since the water heater is in the garage, but there is NO power at the water heater's location, and I'm not going to run an 8-4 Romex over there for that. The Romex would cost a good fraction as much as the heater, and it would have to be at least 50 feet, probably 75, to get from the 240-volt outside box, up and back down. The heat-pump is supposedly the absolute cheapest hot water you can get, but the appliance is not. Side effect, though, would be a slight cooling effect in the garage! Still, it needs electricity, including capacity for electric-element heating in high demand (the same as a standard electric heater,) and they ain't no 'lectric at da heater. So gas!

I love cooking with gas, and I would like to get a gas range, but there's nothing wrong with my glass-top range, so I can't make it the insurance company's problem. Oddly, all the ladies I've talked to about it seem to hate gas for cooking, not because they don't like the results, but because they're afraid of it! My ex-wife refused to consider a gas range when we got the glasstop, because she thinks gas will explode or suffocate us. Not could, or might, or there's a .0000003% possibility, she thinks it will! We have a gas furnace, we have a gas water heater, we have a gas grill, but we ain't gettin' no gas range. Then the bitch left after a couple of years... Shoulda stuck to my guns.

Might spring the difference for a gas dryer, though. The appliance costs more than an electric dryer, but there is a gas line there. Haven't decided on that, yet, as the readiness for laundry facilities is quite far down the timeline. Insurance does owe me an electric dryer...

I did go look at flooring. Briefly. I went in the store my contractor works with, and got all goofied up with the choices available. Colors, materials, styles; I was more than a tad overwhelmed! Same with cabinets and countertops. I am absolutely not an interior decorator, nor do I know anyone who is. My girlfriend has fabulous taste, but she lives in Orlando. I'm sure she'd just love to drive up for a weekend of paint, cabinet, and flooring shopping!!!

 

[Auburn]

Looks like you finally have a good contractor that is doing it right.  Hopefully the rest goes well for you.

 

[Bounce]

Congrats. We did that with the master bathroom a while back. Not as big a project as yours but we were living in place while it was ongoing.

https://fjr-tips.org/misc/Remodel/MB_Remodel/Welcome.html

 

[hppants]

Good to see this moving.  Perhaps the end is finally closer than the beginning.

 

[wfooshee]

Found out last week that my mother-in-law (ex- actually) is in possibly a worse position than me, even though her house is "fixed" and she's back in it. Her insurance company folded and ceased operation back in August. She claims to have not gotten the letter, and found out about this by accident when visiting her agent for something else. I don't know if she's even had coverage since that cut-off date.

They gave her a quote, which stated that her electrical panel had to be replaced within the first 30 days. That confused me, because she'd just gone through repairs just as serious as what I'm going through, i.e. house gutted and rebuilt inside. her electrical should have been brought up to snuff. Looking at her panel, though, it's the panel from when the house was built in 1976! There are two panels, one with the 220 stuff and one with 110 circuits, side-by-side, in a utility room at the NE corner of the house, where the service comes in. The 110 box has three 220 circuits in it! On pulling the cover, I found that grounds and neutrals share the strips, not separated at all. There's also a loose transformer in the bottom of the box, not visible with the cover on, with a cable that drops through the bottom of the box into the wall, going who knows where. It's unlabeled, but apparently there's a low-voltage circuit going somewhere.

None of the breakers are arc-fault. Her kitchen outlets are all on one circuit, with the first receptacle being a GFCI. Same with the bathrooms, a GFCI receptacle, and the lights are on the same circuit with the receptacle. Also, only about half of the breakers are labeled in the box. Not sure how she was allowed to move back in, as this surely could not have been inspected and passed as a new repair! She can't produce any of the paperwork, so we're scrambling around with the contractor and the insurance agent to find documentation of what's actually been done for her.

We know the contractor did some shoddy work, as her carpet in the great room has blocks of color mismatched pieces, like carpet from different lots. The quarter-round molding at the baseboards doesn't meet in many corners through out the house. She has a well pump in the back yard and they did not repair the pumphouse, so the pump and its controls are open to the weather.

We ordered a 4-point inspection for this past Friday, but I couldn't be there, and no one has told me anything about the results of that. I shudder to think what an electrical upgrade is going to cost, especially now that all the interior walls are finished!

EDIT: Just got word that the 4-point inspection passed! All I can think of was that her electrical was grandfathered in somehow, because it doesn't even approach current code! Now I wonder if that's going to be an insurability problem for her!



Meanwhile, my house is progressing, slowly. The garage door is reframed, but no door, yet (have to wait for wallboard.) I have new siding on the ends of the house and the front of the porch peak, and new porch rails. The siding has been removed from the back of the house but the thermal board under has to be replaced, which they weren't expecting. As explained to me, with current construction, the underneath on the siding is the structural part and the siding simply sits on top of that. Back in the day, T1-11 was considered structural, so underneath is just cheap, soft foam-board with foil on it. Work is stopped while proper underwear gets ordered. At least it's only the back (and in the garage interior under the sheetrock,) as the front and end elevations of the house are bricked up to the roof joists.

No word yet on window arrival...

ANOTHER EDIT: They're putting plywood up to underlay the siding. I guess they'll put a vapor barrier over that before the siding goes up. I misunderstood what he was explaining still needed to happen, and thought there was some other kind of thermal board coming.

 

[lonerider]

Transformer with the loose wire is likely for the doorbell. Good luck to both of you with the remainder of your repairs. Tom

 

[Bounce]

Transformer with the loose wire is likely for the doorbell. Good luck to both of you with the remainder of your repairs. Tom

VOM meter it for 12v DC

 

[wfooshee]

And more from the house...

I mentioned previously that while the walls and ceilings are just studs I was pulling Ethernet through the house, and setting up high power and Ethernet outlets for wall-mounted TVs in the bedrooms. Here's one, and blurry in the background you might can make out the similar boxes in the adjacent room. The other Ethernet cable on the right of the receptacle goes down to a regular wall jack. Each bedroom has a wall jack at the normal low height and the TV jack behind the TV. The master bedroom will have two wall jacks and the TV jack, there will be a jack in the dining room (just in case) and one in the living room, in addition to the high TV jack. I've also run speaker wires to the back wall of the living room for surround-sound, and have a similar high outlet and Ethernet jack for the living room TV. I hope to have no visible cables, or even visible raceways, to the TVs. I have yet to decide how I'm getting the needed HDMI and antenna cables to the TV. I'd planned to use those wall plates with the large opening filled with brush strands, one behind the TV and one down low behind the furniture that will be there, but with it being an insulated wall (against the garage,) I don't know how I'd shove the cables through after the wallboard goes up, and I won't know what cables I need until I'm moving in, which is after the wallboard goes up. I guess I can borrow a cable-fish from work.

Here's the living room, with the canless LED lights I'm putting in, mentioned in post 46 above. These simply clip to the sheetrock, needing no structure to be fixed to. Right now they're just hanging from the Romex. I have two at the front of the living room, and there are two over where the sofa will be. I'm also using one for over the kitchen sink. These are dimmable and color-selectable. you can set them from absolute pure painful bright LED white to nearly candle-light warm orange-ish. I have them set to pretty much match a regular filament bulb. They only run 8 watts each!

Outside, siding is in place on the gables and over the porch, and new porch posts and railings are in place. Old siding is stripped on the back of the house, along with the thermal/vapor underlayment. They removed the windows in this process, and openings for new windows will be cut when the windows arrive. the gable vents are much smaller than before, but my roof didn't have a ridge vent before. That A/C compressor will be going, as the entire HVAC has to come out due to mold at the time. This system ran on the old R-12, and we can't have that!

They had already installed the insulation in the exterior walls, and he was wishing they hadn't as this was happening. It would have been so much easier to just pound the panels out from inside instead of prying all those nails and ripping stuff out! OTOH, who knows what damage would have been done to the studs doing that... He said to me, "They definitely used the right fasteners for this!!!"

Plywood underlayment done, no window openings until the windows get here. Then the openings get cut out and the new T1-11 goes up.
As an aside, I guess you can tell that yard maintenance has not been a thing for a while...

Like I said in a prior post, when the house was built the T1-11 was structural. and the foam underlayment did not contribute to wall stiffness, just served as the moisture barrier. T1-11 no longer satisfies that code so the plywood has to go up, then a moisture barrier and then the siding.

And my windows arrived about a week after this work was done. No work done yet on getting them in, they're sitting in my living room.

I was surprised to see that I had a standard window for the kitchen instead of a garden window, and the contractor said that garden windows that meet Florida's 2020 impact and wind mitigation requirements don't exist. That will not make my cats happy!!!

As for garden windows and Florida, I did find one from Ventana USA, their 2050i, which they state on their website is the only impact-rated vinyl-frame garden window on the market. I found it on Florida's approved product list as approved for Florida except Miami-Dade and Broward. I have no idea what it costs, and I have no idea what to do about the window the contractor already ordered that I wouldn't need, so maybe I'd have to pay him for that as opposed to expecting him to eat it, I don't know. (There's already one window he'll have to eat... there are two bathroom windows in the set that arrived, that smallest size you see on the picture above, and I only have one window that size. I checked to see if he'd ordered something the wrong size, and if you take that extra one away, the others all match existing openings.) Anyway, I forwarded what I found to him, but that was just yesterday. He said he will contact the manufacturer and see what he can find out. He also said none of his three normal distributors work with Ventana.

In another wake-up call, the contractor states that he discovered his partner has not submitted their estimate to my insurance carrier! In other words, this is all going on with an assumption in place for something that hasn't happened, yet! Wonderful! I reconfirmed all of that contact information with him, he's sending it all down, and he confirmed that he's a solo operation now: no partner, just employees and subs.

As for the contractor I signed last year, also mentioned in #46, there's been no real movement on that as yet. I think arraignment is this month.

 

[mcatrophy]

Sounds like encouraging progress.

At least the cats have somewhere to laze. Hope those pots by the white one are glued down, or there might be more unforeseen expense.

 

[Auburn]

for that future HDMI cable you could get a piece of 1-1/2“ pvc and scrap it to the stud next to your cable boxes to use as a chase. Then install the low voltage outlet boxes with no backs. It will make easy work of fishing the cable from one box to another. If 1-1/2” is too big, just make sure it’s big enough to get the cable ends through it.

 

[Bounce]

Wiring runs along the joists need to be squared up a little more. Some are sagging down to where sheet rockers might nail a run. I ran Ethernet through the house when it was being built too... will eventually need to re-run it using the old as the fish tape since the standards have gone up since then.

Pulling it through PVC is a good idea to help future-proof the install. I know that I pinned mine with Romex staples, so I'm SOL on that.

On a smaller scale, here was my last big construction project.

https://www.fjr-tips.org/misc/pics/shop/shop.html

 

[hppants]

It's kind of feeling like the end is closer than the beginning, and not a moment too soon.

Minor observation - your old residential HVAC unit did not run on R-12. That is a non-flammable product that was used in automobiles before 1994-ish. Your unit likely ran on R-22, another freon that is no longer available for purchase.

I hope the contractor gets squared away with your insurance. Is there a clause in your contract that ties the work to your claim?

 

[wfooshee]

Yeah, I didn't really know which, but I knew it was the old now-illegal stuff.