Have you ever hired a contractor for a home renovation project? If you have and if they did a great job, can you give me their number because I have yet to find a contractor I can trust!

In fact, one time we were scammed out of quite a bit of money and left with only the demolition done on the project. It was awful and enough to scare me off from ever attempting a home renovation project again.

That’s why I can really relate to this story where a homeowner discovers that a contractor didn’t just make a mistake but intentionally scammed him out of money. To make it worse, this isn’t the first time he’s done it! He has a whole scheme going, or he did until he crossed the wrong homeowner who took him down.

Keep reading for all the details on this construction nightmare and the sweet way it all works out.

Contractor procrastinates for profit, gets prison

This is something that happened to my grandfather. To understand him, he was a quality control engineer for a pretty major manufacturing firm, and he was a master of aggressively renegotiating deals.

He was and is a strict task master, not entitled or unreasonable, but if something went wrong there would be hell to pay.

Grandfather hired a contractor.

So, he decided that he wanted to renovate his home, take the moderately-big two story house and add two new bedrooms and a master bath.

He brings in a contractor and gets a quote, says as part of the work they’ll need to completely refinish the front too.

Grandfather agrees and they start work.

It’s a serious effort, winds up carving open the whole front of the house and all sorts of madness. Things go well enough at first, the destruction goes smoothly.

The work slowed down.

Then start construction.

At first things were just slow going, sluggish delivery from sources, slow permits from the city, you get the idea.

Then things get silly.

It took them over three months to start and finish the plumbing. Four months for the insulation. My grandfather is paying for a lot of time and not a lot of work done.

Then everything came to a screeching halt.

He’s irritated about the speed, but besides making some noise there’s not really much to be done about it.

Bit by bit, the house starts to come together.

Then, as they’re putting on the weather-proofing, an inspector comes in and puts a stop to the whole affair.

The contractor had improperly filed the plans.

This is seriously taking forever.

Now, my grandfather is pretty furious by this point, but he keeps a cool enough head, starts asking what’s going to be done about it with the contractor.

The thinking was that they redraft the plans and send them out for reapproval. Contractor says he’ll do it.

FIVE MONTHS go by.

The house is just sitting there, fancy new framework still hanging in the breeze.

Uh-oh!

Then, all of a sudden, the contractor says he’s pulling out.

He had no idea the hell he’d unleashed.

My grandfather didn’t just jump straight to suing him. Oh no sir. He took his time before even getting a lawyer. He did his homework.

He tracked down every single client that this guy had had for the last three years and did a deep dive on the books to figure out what the hell happened.

It was a pattern.

Turns out that this wasn’t an isolated incident, just the most egregious.

As it happens, this contractor had a penchant for screwing people over, turning minor reno jobs into complete dumpster fires.

His modus operandi was to file the changes with the city, make a private second set of plans, start making things based off the second set, intentionally let the city halt the construction, then restart the project on a third draft.

After talking to some of the other customers, he and eight of the other victims collectively filed charges against him.

The revenge was a success.

They annihilated this guy.

They took every cent he had (which wasn’t that much, his scheme hadn’t actually done him that much good), liquidated his company, sent him to something like fifteen years in prison for fraud, and got the state to help recoup expenses.

Two months later, a new contracting company blitzed my grandfather’s renovations and he was able to drink in his master suite to toast his revenge.

It can be really hard to find a reliable contractor, but this guy was a true nightmare. Good job to grandpa for taking him down!

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a customer who tried to force an off-the-clock employee to get back to work.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person has a theory.

Yes, doing the job right is definitely better than going to jail.

This is funny!

It could’ve been worse!

In the end, the grandfather got his construction project completed, and that’s what matters the most.

But why is it that there are so many awful, lying, cheating contractors out there? It’s truly awful. It makes it hard to trust any contractor at all.

What’s a person to do when they need to hire a contractor? Seriously asking. I’m not sure of the answer. I’ve heard too many nightmare stories and lived a couple of my own.