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If a contractor fuck you over, is there any recourse?
I wouldn't mind paying extra if they do a good job, but if do a horrible job and overcharge you then that's pretty much a scam isn't it?
I think of IT support, where people willingly fork over hundreds for a repair that could've taken a 15 minute google search. People pay for ignorance, or just convenience. Why charge $10 for 15 minute of work, if people willingly pay $50 or $100?
I make enough now that I'd rather pay for a contractor than do something myself especially if it needs a ton of manual labor, but I haven't had much experience with contractors. I'll take your experience as a cautionary tale.
I am not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice.
It's very difficult to bring serious punishment to a contractor. There are exceptions -- if someone just doesn't do anything, or completely destroys an area, or literally seriously injures or kills someone -- you can sometimes get criminal charges or a contractor's license revoked, but there's a big emphasis on 'sometimes', here. Merely shoddy or below-code work will almost never hit that bar.
Meanwhile, refusing to pay for contracted work that was partially- or incompetently-completed work will almost always result in a construction lien against your property. It's possible to clear this up in court if the work is clearly incomplete or dangerous, but if it's merely incompetent this can be much more complicated and dependent on the whims of a judge, and while active will prevent most loans using or sales of the property.
Mediation is usually the first recourse, if the problem is merely scale rather than scam. If the fault is just doing a bad job for the price, but all the rough parts are kinda in place if you squint, you'll often have no recourse but to badmouth the contractor. Assuming scam...
At least in the United States (and Canada) your main option is court. Below a certain (state-specific) threshold, that will be in small claims court -- good in the sense that it's not very expensive (or slow) to bring suit, bad in the sense that you'll have very limited recourse and if you win will almost always get a (capped) compensatory damages. Having clear contractual obligations (don't just write "follow code": mandate materials and specific tasks) and documenting the full scope of both the damages and before the work can make it easier to win; longer delays before filing suit or having work where it's difficult to find an expert to document problems will be harder (or, worse, if you let a contractor tell you that it 'won't need a permit or inspections' and you believed them). Larger (>5k-10k USD, though again this varies by state) stuff will have to go to conventional civil courts and is almost always going to need lawyers involved to some extent.
Note that just winning in court and demonstrating the damages to the court doesn't necessarily mean you'll get your cash back: a lot of scuzzier contractors are fly-by-night operations that can be extremely difficult to recover damages from, either being conventionally judgement proof by not having a lot of recoverable assets, or by just being too obnoxious to recover them.
The typical advice is prevention. You can't avoid every scammer, but a lot of them have a number of red flags. Most reputable contractors for major projects will have past projects they can point you toward as references, will have enough capital that you can contract most payment to occur after major milestones or project completion, and will not try to skimp on permitting and inspections, because that's how you become a reputable contractor. Most scammy contractors won't put off payment and accept specific contractual requirements that they can't meet, because that's the fastest way for a scammer to not get paid and the contractor's lien to get thrown out. If you get multiple estimates, someone offering an order-of-magnitude lower prices than the average without offering a different scope of work is probably not gonna be able to get the job done.
But those won't help if the contractor just plain lies, or if the inspectors are morons or felons/demented, or if a scammer has hollowed out a once-reputable company or the 'reputable company' was really just a gateway to a roulette of sometimes-reputable subcontractors.
The best prevention has to involve using your own evaluation, whether that be to check yourself or to evaluate specific experts, and to do so throughout the process.
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The best recourse you can have is social (not professional) reputation in the community.
I'm not a Jehovah's Witness, but a lot of my cousins are big at the local kingdom hall. I've used a lot of JWs they recommended for small jobs, because they won't screw me too bad, knowing that if they screw me my cousins will hear about it, and it'll become gossip among JWs.
Don't get me wrong, they'll still scrimp on stuff they think you won't notice, or do totally unaccountably dumb stuff like pour extra paint down the drain, but they generally won't steal or fail to perform.
My biggest problem with contractors lately has been that I've had so many plates spinning, that I have this perpetual problem of leaving them alone for too long, and they "helpfully" decide to build the whole thing out of popsicle sticks and old plywood. When if they had just called me, I would have gotten the proper material and had them do it right.
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Honestly, if a contractor charges you 10* market rate but does a good job, I would just consider that capitalism at work. Yes, it is probably morally wrong and pretty scammy; but what isn't?
The problem (as you noticed) is that price is decoupled from quality.
Re. consequences: No, not really. You should only use licenced and bonded contractors and get everything in writing; specially for important shit. (If you get a guy from the HD parking lot to lay some carpet, the worst that happens is you need to relay the carpet. Less so in the case of eg. roof maintenance.)
If you get everything in writing (Dates and Rates+ specified materials at specified prices, etc) and they fuck you on one of them, you can usually recover something in small claims court or get them to redo the work because they know you can get them in court.
If you don't have it in writing? hahahaha get fucked kid.
The real issue is that lots of shitty contracting only becomes apparent 3 years later when the boomer fuck who had the license is dead or cirrhotic or fucking coolie boys in Malaysia
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Not paying them and seeing who has better underworld-adjacent friends.
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