cornutt
Forum Master
For those of you that have been following the saga of our house building: We hired a lawyer yesterday. We had a consultation with a firm here that does construction contract law (and doesn't have any builders as clients). I got a reference from a friend to one of the firm's junior partners, and she arranged a meeting with us and a senior partner who is familiar with this type of case. And, the architect was nice enough to attend and support us with his documentation.
The lawyers think we probably have some kind of case. The contract has an arbitration clause, but they tell us that the kind of damages we might be facing (loss of our locked-in mortage rate and loss of our right to convert the construction loan, plus additional interest we've already had to pay) would probably be excluded from the arbitration clause. An interesting tidbit: they have represented a previous client against this same builder. (The architect had tried to find that out before we selected that builder, but he didn't find anything in court records; the previous case must have been settled before a hearing ever got scheduled.) They found out who the builder's lawyer is, and they told us that his lawyer is a good one. However, they told us that was probably good for us, because a good lawyer won't advise his client to do anything stupid. We just gave the builder a check last week, so he can't claim we aren't paying him, and the winter has been unusually mild here. I'm going to pull some weather data in case he tries to claim weather delays.
So we're going to start with the proverbial strongly worded letter and see if that gets us any action. They are going to have it in the mail by the end of the week. We sent them our punch list, and tomorrow we're going to have a few email exchanges and whittle that down to the most important items. Our goal at this point is to get the house complete enough that the city will issue the C.O., at which time we'll wait for the contract to expire, move in, and finish the rest ourselves. The main items standing in the way of that are getting the plumbing and electrical finished, paving the driveway (the city is a stickler for that), and finishing a few areas of the eaves that are still open to the outside. I'm trying to find out if the deck has to be finished, or if we can just lock and secure the deck doors so we can finish it later.
The good news is it does look like the builder has been paying his subs, so at least we don't have any lien problems.
The lawyers think we probably have some kind of case. The contract has an arbitration clause, but they tell us that the kind of damages we might be facing (loss of our locked-in mortage rate and loss of our right to convert the construction loan, plus additional interest we've already had to pay) would probably be excluded from the arbitration clause. An interesting tidbit: they have represented a previous client against this same builder. (The architect had tried to find that out before we selected that builder, but he didn't find anything in court records; the previous case must have been settled before a hearing ever got scheduled.) They found out who the builder's lawyer is, and they told us that his lawyer is a good one. However, they told us that was probably good for us, because a good lawyer won't advise his client to do anything stupid. We just gave the builder a check last week, so he can't claim we aren't paying him, and the winter has been unusually mild here. I'm going to pull some weather data in case he tries to claim weather delays.
So we're going to start with the proverbial strongly worded letter and see if that gets us any action. They are going to have it in the mail by the end of the week. We sent them our punch list, and tomorrow we're going to have a few email exchanges and whittle that down to the most important items. Our goal at this point is to get the house complete enough that the city will issue the C.O., at which time we'll wait for the contract to expire, move in, and finish the rest ourselves. The main items standing in the way of that are getting the plumbing and electrical finished, paving the driveway (the city is a stickler for that), and finishing a few areas of the eaves that are still open to the outside. I'm trying to find out if the deck has to be finished, or if we can just lock and secure the deck doors so we can finish it later.
The good news is it does look like the builder has been paying his subs, so at least we don't have any lien problems.
Good luck getting everything settled!
