Before beginning house work, be sure to do your homework

By JOANNE CLEAVER
Posted: June 14, 2008

Louis Weiher could hardly believe what he saw when he took a look at the abandoned remodeling project in Helen Kidd’s house.

"It looked like a kid's treehouse - just boards nailed together," he says.

The project was to include a new bathroom in the basement of the ranch house and finish existing raw space. Instead, the handyman - clearly in over his head - had sawed away with abandon, extracting critical loadbearing walls, floor joists and ripping up finishes, walls and flooring.

Kidd thought she'd hired a known quantity for the remodeling project. She'd found the handyman through the Better Business Bureau. But now she knows - and wants other homeowners to know - that hiring a home improvement contractor should involve several levels of investigation, referrals and credential-checking.

Kidd thought she was playing it smart by starting the handyman with a small project first: fixing the exterior siding.

That seemed to go well, so she had him estimate the remodeling project. He sketched out a plan, told her to buy materials, cashed her check and had at it.

The project was a literal mess from the first moment, with debris, water and live electrical lines strewn around the work area. Sewer gas leaked into the basement.

"The last straw was when I came home from work and he had put in the bathtub where he said it belonged, but it constantly leaked. He tried to fix it, but he couldn't get it to stop leaking," Kidd says.

It was a relief when he disappeared. Kidd called in a building inspector and an electrical contractor.

The former wanted the building evacuated because it was unsafe and the latter quickly corralled the live wires.

After hiring an architect to figure out a repair and recovery plan, Kidd called on Carmel Builders of Menomonee Falls to finish the job.

Weiher says Carmel Builders is getting a steady stream of jobs that involve cleaning up the messes of unqualified remodelers.

"It's a relatively easy-entry and a very-easy-exit kind of business," Weiher says.

Referring to the Kidd project, he adds: "It looks like the guy thought it was a lot easier than it was. I think he realized, 'I don't know what I'm doing, and I'm out of money, so I'm going to just stop doing this.' "

Home-improvement spending is slow, which means contractors are looking for work. Meanwhile, economically pinched homeowners are looking for bargains.

Kidd says she was relieved when Carmel swept in and swept up.

"They knew what they were doing, and they had more men on the job," she says. "It was seven months with the handyman here and it took Carmel six weeks to fix it."