In January I had texted the contractor that had originally referred us to Chase.
I just asked him how well he knew Chase and what he knew of him.
Cole had responded that he had known him a long time and he knew a lot of the projects he was working on and he hired quality subs and did good work.
My intent had been to maybe suggest he stop referring people to him but since they sounded like such good buddies and at the time we were not wanting Chase to know we were checking up on him, so I just thanked him and moved on.
A couple of weeks later, the very end of January, Cole emailed me and said he heard that Chase was working for us and wanted to know how it was going.
Since he asked, I told him everything. I did not hold back.
He was sick! He couldn't believe what Chase was doing and said he thought he knew him better than that.
He felt so bad and asked what he could do to help us.
About the same time, Dustin was wanting to frame in our fireplace but was told by the inspector that he needed to get engineering to check off on our roof before we could proceed.
Apparently, when we added the triangle windows, it changed the pitch of the roof (which we were aware of) and it also ended up changing the trusses to stick built.
Unbeknownst to us, Chase never had it all reengineered.
When we had it checked by our engineering company, they told us we had to rip out our center roof beam and put in a much larger one!
We were just sick about that since Dustin had spent all that time, effort and our money on finally getting the roof on so that we could have everything dry underneath (minus the 4 inches of ice in the basement of course). Dustin came up with another solution that they agreed to of putting in a post in the middle to support the beam we did have.
In the midst of all of this, Cole came over and we met him for the first time (when he had given us a bid the previous year he had done it all by email)
He was very nice and gave us more background and into concerning the Chase saga. Apparently, Chase had recently used Cole's account to buy the lumber for the other job in Nibley. Soon after, a friend of ours that Andy had talked to at church about our woes talked to his builder (he is building a house down the road from us) who ended up being Cole and suggested he check in with us. That's how Cole found out what was going on with Chase.
After our talk with him, he had us leaning toward changing the roof beam.
However, soon after, he brought his framer over to look at the situation...and he strongly suggested we do the post support.
Here are a couple of pictures of us holding up a piece of wood trying to envision the beam and if we could live with that.
We also talked to Merill about it and finally decided that was the route we were wanting to go.
There would have been a lot of unknowns with changing out the beam and it would have cost about three times as much so we figured we could make the post work.
The problem is, the post needs to go in the basement as well and since we have so much ice down there and it involved pouring a new cement footing we were at a stand still until it warmed up a bit.
I am writing this on March 1st and we are still waiting.
Honestly, this has been a record winter for temps and amounts of snow. Of course it has.
We are really grateful for everyone that is helping us out though.
We ended up parting ways with Dustin since he can't frame the fireplace until our repairs are made and we didn't want to drag it out for him.
Some day this will be done. :)
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