I will admit I am not looking forward to writing this post. It's a little bit painful. Also, it always stresses me out trying to write big, involved things where I have to try and remember details without leaving things out 😕
Chase's brother, Dustin, worked all through December and into January all by himself to get our addition framed. He was kind and easy to work with. I don't know if we saw Chase at all during December and had very minimal contact with him via text.
Dustin came to us one evening...January 9th to be exact...and asked if he could speak to us about his brother. He said he hadn't been paid a cent for all the work that he had been doing and that he had had to spend his own money on some extra supplies.
We assured him that we had given his brother plenty of money to pay him.
Dustin said Chase had been telling him all along that we were waiting on a loan to go through before we could pay. (That made me so mad that Chase had been lying about our finances.)
After discussing a little longer, Dustin left and Andy and I were left to wonder about whether or not Dustin was telling us the truth or if he was in cahoots with Chase to try and get more money out of us.
I will try and summarize the next several days by saying we looked into things and found out that we were not Chase's first victims and that he was already in a lawsuit with a former client (who turned out to be his second cousin and neighbor in Wellsville). I spoke with her extensively and heard all about the mess in which Chase had left her.
We were shocked, frustrated and disheartened.
Learning from what this former client had told me, I spent the next week trying to track down all the subs and companies Chase had used to do the work he had done to that point.
I was trying to find out if they had been paid.
Unfortunately, I was only able to find out about one of them. Our excavator had not received his money. I asked him what the bill had been and compared that to the itemized list that we had asked Chase for the week before we found out about what was going on. It was clear Chase had way overcharged us for that one item. Who knew what else he had overcharged on?
We sought counsel from an attorney friend, family and others.
We looked into the idea of holding his mini excavator that had been sitting in our backyard for months on end until he payed us the money he had misused. (we were told that wasn't a good idea...but that did come into play later)
We had contractors give us estimations on how much they figured we had in labor and materials in our addition so far. The gap between those numbers and what we had given Chase was averaging $30,000.
We also had a fun night of drama when Dustin called the the Sheriff's department on Chase.
Chase had told Dustin to move the white dump truck in the side driveway so he get his mini ex out.
Dustin told him he wouldn't until he payed him. Chase came out anyway around 9 p.m...when Dustin found out he was there he told us to call the police. Andy didn't feel comfortable with that and told Dustin as much. So Dustin made the call and we ended up with 3 officials at our door and a search for Chase in our backyard. They ended up finding him in his truck and told the brothers they needed to settle this in daylight and basically stop bothering us. Dustin moved his truck the next day.
We knew all along that Chase had been working on a very similar addition on another Nibley home. Well, when Dustin told us in January who the family was I immediately called the wife and told her all we knew. They had been super frustrated with how things had been going and had considered letting Chase go when they got their money's worth out of him. However, like us, they had not been questioning his ethics so I believe my call was somewhat of a shock.
We didn't let Chase know how much we knew about his past and what was going on. We did let him know though that we were not happy with things.
Andy set up a lunch with him to discuss things. Andy tried a kind, gentle approach, asking about his family and his personal life before moving on to business. Chase was an emotional wreck. Andy told him we needed to see receipts and invoices for everything (we had seen none at this point...just his itemized list on which he could have made up every number)
He agreed to bring them to us a few days later.
The night he came, he was up front with us in that he didn't bring any receipts. He offered no explanation for that but tried to work the numbers out with us so that we could part ways and be finished. The way he explained his itemized list (which was deceitful in itself) he came out as owing us $7,000.
He was a smooth talker and we agreed to it. After he left, Andy was going over the numbers again and realized Dustin's pay had never been addressed.
He called Chase and was told that was our responsibility to pay his brother his $11,000!
When we had time to digest everything we decided we to let Chase know via text we were done paying. We had already payed enough and then some therefore, Chase needed to pay his brother.
We also had 4 inches of ice in our basement addition, water that had come in the house and forced us to pull up the carpet in multiple areas, a huge pile of dirt left in our backyard and quite a bit of emotional damage on top of being swindled out of $30,000.
We thought of litigation but decided Chase didn't have any money to give us.
He had already told his second cousin he was going to be declaring bankruptcy and she wouldn't get any money out of him.
We would be spending more money, time and effort to get nothing in return.
We were simply out the money and needed to move on.
By the way, Dustin continued to come and work through all of this.
He wanted to get our roof on so we wouldn't keep getting snow inside.
He wanted to finish the job he had said he would do...even though he knew he wasn't getting paid.
We appreciated his dedication.
We had multiple contractors that looked at the job the last two months tell us Dustin had done a good job with the framing.
Once Chase was out of the picture, we wanted to get things moving again as soon as possible.
We got a bid from the same contractor that had cleaned up and finished Chase's cousin's home.
It came in as really high so we decided to try and general ourselves...with the help of my dad and my brother's friend TJ.
To be continued in the February update...
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