It is possible, that when the sub bid your job originally that he already had it tightened up in order to get the job to begin with. There may not be any cushion. Yes I am willing to risk not getting the job by not saying uncle when my arm is twisted. No, I dont need the experience. A Message From the Low Bidder: Dear Cherished Customer, Thank you for hiring us. We look forward to saving you a lot of money compared with all the other contractors who submitted quotes. As for your inquiry as to how we can charge so much less than everyone else, I welcome this opportunity to explain how we operate. You see, unlike many of our competitors, we don't believe in paying top dollar to employees. There are so many people looking for work these days, it's pretty easy to find some desperate enough to work for far less than they're worth. If they start complaining, we just get rid of them and find replacements in a few days. Most jobs get disrupted just a little bit. Besides, we don't look to hire the best workers. Most of the work required for your project can be performed by people with almost no skills. (In fact, if you care to do some of it yourself, I can save you even more money.) Heck, I've learned that some of the best employees don't even speak English. They work cheapest of all and never sass the boss. Most of the time they can figure out my hand signals telling them what to do. If anything complicated does arise, that's what I'm here for. It may take a few days for me to get around to check out your job, but with all the money you're saving, I'm sure you won't mind the wait. Not only don't we pay our employees very much, we offer no benefits, because that adds way too much to overhead. Our employees know that if they get sick and can't work, they don't make any money. So you can rest assured that they'll show up at your job even if they come down with pneumonia or TB. I'll tell you something else -- our installers and technicians work fast. A lot of contractors tell their crews to hang around jobs forever making sure everything is just right. Experienced as I am, I know exactly when something is just good enough to get by. That's when we call it a job. Think of all the money you save with us not worrying about frilly details. Another thing is, we know how to cut through all that government paperwork. Most rules and regulations make no sense. For instance, everyone in the construction industry knows that hardly anyone ever gets caught working without a permit or trade licenses. The money we save by avoiding these technicalities gets passed on to you. We also cut corners with code requirements & standards at every opportunity. Standards do nothing but jack up the price of a project. By substituting cheaper materials and ignoring labor-intensive procedures required to meet code, we are able to charge much less than those suckers who operate by the book. Insurance is another area where we realize big savings. How many jobs do you ever hear of where there's a payoff? Insurance is nothing but money down the drain. If something does go wrong, you can always sue us. What more protection do you need than that? I'll let you in on another inside secret. We cleverly save you money by not paying all of our bills. Our company has accounts at about a dozen supply houses around town, and we never pay for material unless we absolutely have to. Most wholesalers will carry us for 60 or 90 days before they start nagging me about payment. Then I can usually string them along for another few months with promises or token payments. If one supplier cuts us off, I simply take my business to the others and go through the same routine. It's a game that real sharp contractors like myself have refined to an art form. You ought to be proud to have your job done by an artist! Something else that separates us from the pack is that we're not a bunch of namby-pambies hung up on safety concerns. Accidents will happen, so why bother trying to prevent them! Some contractors worry more about their trades people getting hurt than they do about getting the job done fast. Believe me, hard hats, eye shields and work gloves only slow people down. So we don't supply those things to our workers. Here's where we gain another advantage by hiring a bunch of people who don't speak English. They can't read warning signs that might make them too cautious. This saves you money. Also, I'm sure you noticed that when you called me you reached an answering machine, not some secretary costing over $10,000 a year. Sorry that it took me so long to get back to you, but that's the price you pay for saving money. You may have also noticed that our trucks are run-down, our tools worn out and this letter is being written on a 1950s vintage manual typewriter. Our philosophy is to make do with whatever is already paid for, no matter how old. That's another reason we can charge you so much less. Nor do we waste money on association dues and educational seminars like some of our high-fluting competitors. Believe me, I've been in this business for more than 20 years and I learned everything anyone needs to know in my first two years of apprenticeship. If it was good enough for my daddy and granddaddy, it's good enough for you. By the way, did I mention that we guarantee our work. Just make sure you catch what's wrong before the job is done, because at the prices we charge, we can't afford any call backs. Thank you once again for letting us do your work. We're happy to be the low bidder. I'm sure you'll get your money's worth. Sincerely, The Low Bidder

Oh and in case you're curious, these scammers make a TON of money! Just to give some additional information on John Boko. As I write, I have been in contact with "John" posing as a fellow scammer looking for work. John has just offered me a job as just one of several of his European representatives to help cash and transfer payments from scammed victims for him. I was offered between $2,000 and $3,000 per month just for the simple job of gathering victim's payments together and forwarding the money into his bank account. During our conversations I John told me he was making around $45,000 a month on average from his various scams, ranging from standard 419 type scams to cheque and Credit Card fraud. His team consists of around 20 individuals located in various countries around the world. I was also able to discover the name and contact details of John's artist and managed to contact him to confirm he had indeed been paid for his work, although he wouldn't tell me how much he was paid! I'm still in contact with John, who calls himself Tony, who incidentally just collected a $15,000 payment from one of his "guys" in Switzerland. Any information I can find will be handed over to the relevant authorities. I hope to update this page a little more soon.

Just a minor update - I had the trusted contractor here and he agreed that work remaining is far more than the balance owed. He also said that he found the work done to be shoddy (no shock!), and sadly enough, found more issues that I had missed (very clear, once he pointed them out, i.e almost twice as many nail pops as I had noticed among other things). He also explained how a few things need to be fixed properly and I was surprised at how much more would be involved than I had guessed (that is why I am not a pro or DIYing more than I am able to). I don't have figures yet, but will in a few days. I am holding off doing anything until I have that in hand. I need more information before making big decisions. I would imagine a potential lawyer would need that info as well. I am sure that if a case is not winnable, the lawyer is not going to bother taking it on. We don't have deep pockets, so it is not like they can bill us for hours on end... It might be that they respond to being served or a warning shot from an atty. Not everything goes to court these days. We just want the work completed, and by somebody other than them at this point. We are not asking for the moon and stars, but if it involves more time and money on our part, what we ask for will be going up. It may turn out to be a small claims court case. They may not want to spend their time and gamble on the outcome of going to even small claims court. I'd say my case is the much stronger one because the physical evidence is clear. This company seems to be in good financial shape, and any potential lawsuit by us would not put them out of business. If it messes with their license, then they should have thought of that sooner before leaving this mess behind. Hopefully, they have errors and omissions insurance of some sort of coverage (such as I have at work). If we did get a judgement, even including for our inconvenience/pain and suffering and with interest, I doubt it would be a huge number. I do think that once we have both photos and a written estimate (we may get several) from licensed contractor/s, we will have a pretty solid case that they could not have expected final payment with the condition they left our house. If any judge has ever owned a home and sees these photos, I doubt there would be a lot of gray area. It is clear that we hired them to do a professional job and got an incomplete, poorly done one. Their argument is that they have the right to have left our project for not having been paid the final payment. It is easy to see that the work was not "final" so that any reasonable person would not have paid. Besides, they had not even billed us for it or made an attempt to be paid that last part. They knew that it would never happen because the job was not done, so did not even bother. If their argument was lack of payment, I imagine they need to show they tried to get paid. They did not even ask verbally. They pressured me for the prior payment, which is why there is such a small balance. I was worn out at the time and they laid on the guilt that our project had gone long and they were entitled to be paid that amount. I was incredibly stupid and naive to have given them as much as I did (over $7k). I hope if nothing else is gained from this, at least people here will heed this warning! By the time they were asking for it, I "knew" them and was seeing them every day. I wanted to make sure they did not get mad at me and would keep coming to finish. I thought if I held any back, they would slow down the work. Obviously, that basically stopped the work, so I did the wrong thing by paying so much. When you get closer to the finish line, it is easy to get sloppy with decisions and just wanting it to be over. I trusted them and was wrong. What is worse, is dh was absolutely right and he knew, after the fact, that they'd never return once he heard how much I paid. That alone is unforgivable, lol! I have been busy the past few days trying to make it look better where I can without involving the stuff they needed to do. I scrubbed the garage door and the north side of our house where we had some green mold on our siding from the trees and the wet spring. Today, I put primer on the garage door and will paint tomorrow. It feels good to get the stuff I can do, done. There is so much that is waiting on the resolution of the problem areas. I feel like I need to keep moving the ball forward so that the only undone stuff is their responsibility. I can't control what they did not do or did not do right, but I can work on my list. Hopefully, I can make some things look more normal bit by bit....

instead of insults how about posting something that will help? Im guessing at approximate costs to try not to get screwed. For example I had two pool guys come in and said minimum of 150K for a basic pool with spa. How is a homeowner supposed to not get screwed unless they understand the cost of the pieces? A basic pool with a spa in a generic area should be about 40K. We have solid limestone so magically that adds 110K. Really though it takes a backhoe about 14 days to chisel out the pool and it costs about 1K/day for the backhoe + crew. The beam then needs to be more heavy duty. But not to the tune of 110K. My original bids for just the kitchen came in at 140K. I was able to get my contractor to agree to about 60K by leaving all walls in place, cabinets were done by another company at 23K. Building a wall and removing a wall in theory was about 65k, really? Most builders around here wont build a custom home for less than 250/sq ft. My last renovation was really nicely done and was about 11K for the master not including vanities or touching the tub.