Hello there! Hoping someone can shed some light on a situation for me. My husband and I closed on an investment property in July, and immediately after hired a contractor that we were recommended through a friend. He seemed trustworthy and we were in a time crunch to do some improvements on the property over 2-3 weeks and turn around and put the property up for rent. We agreed on a list of items/tasks to be completed by August 3rd for $20,000. We paid him $5,000 the day we signed the contract on July 16th and another $10,000 in accordance with our payment schedule at the end of July. Without going into all the in's and out's I will just say that the contractor was virtually never at the house, and never supervised the work. The work was done by unlicensed, underage, and potentially illegal workers that we never agreed to work with. We were left with countless items that were left incomplete or were done so poorly they will have to be re-done by another contractor. We are both very busy and probably didn't do as good of a job supervising the job as we could have, but every time we visited we would point out items that needed to be fixed or corrected - trying to give him the benefit of the doubt that it would be resolved by the project completion date. We asked over and over for him to fix the work, and he refused, slapping us with the final invoice of $5,000. It will cost us at least this much to have another contractor fix what is there. On top of this we have exceeded the contract date and will be set back by at least a week or two. In our minds, he did not deliver the product agreed upon, he did not perform at the standard of other contractors in town, he breached the contract by not hitting the contract date and then abandoning the remaining items on the list. We also feel that he was deceptive in how he marketed the tasks he was able to take on, and that the job was over his head from the beginning. What do we need to do to protect ourselves and our new investment property from this contractor? I am blown away that after walking out on the job, leaving our house dirty, and with the awful quality of work that he did that he is requesting any additional payment at all.