Mr. Bakondi is correct that you need to hire an attorney if you want to continue to fight with the contractor about this, and escallate it. I do not believe, however, that he is an experienced construction attorney based on the rest of the advice he has given you. Terminating a contractor is a last resort, as it can lead to a raft of unintended consequences and unanticipated expenses. First off, you need to be prepared to prove that you have paid the contractor all that is due under the contract for work performed to date. If not, your refusal to make further payments may place you in the position of the party breaching the contract. Second, if you do have a legitimate owner termination and there is defective work, the idea that the contractor's license bond is a meaningful source of correction and completion funds shows a serious lack of construction industry knowledge. A contractor's license bond is only in the amount of $12,500.00, and that is for all the projects the contractor works on. So unless you are the only customer with a problem with the contractor, and unless the cost to correct any bad work and finish the job is $12,500 or less, the bond is of little use to you. Third, any reputable contractor, even in these hard times, will be very wary of completing a terminated job. Because there is no way after the work is done to conclusively prove what was original work, what was corrected work and what was completion work, the new contractor will have his backside hanging out for any and all latent problems that may be lurking in the work. Accordingly they will charge a significant premium over what they would have charged to do the same work as the original contractor.
I have spent most of my 22+ year career practicing in whole or in part in construction law. My last salaried job was Construction Counsel in the General Counsel's office at San Francisco International Airport. I have yet to see a construction dispute litigated to a conclusion that was anything but a loss for both sides when all the costs and disruption of lives and businesses was tallied up. In the same time I have seen numerous win-win settlements, and even the lose-lose compromises have been better in the end than the lose-lose fight that would have gone on if the parties hand not negotiated a resolution.
That is one of the main reasons I founded Libris Solutions, to provide mediation services to facilitate negotiated resolutions to problems that would only cost both sides thousands of dollars and untold hours of grief. I maintain conference facilities in Carlsbad, about an hour from you, and I do not bill for travel time, only actual mediation session time. I can also arrange meeting space closer to you.
If you and the contractor would like to consider mediation instead of escallating this to lawyers fighting each other and billing you both, please send me an email or give me a call.
