Lessons learned about having something anything done to the home in Maryland

[Anonymous]

Hello folks,

So I've been meaning to do this for awhile and have decided to do a post mortem about my experience about upgrading my home. I have had new siding, new floorings, new appliances, and due to being scammed by a construction company I was in the process of having an addition built and these are some lessons I have learnt. Please, please, please do yourself a favor and avoid the mistakes I have made and please do not be a captain hindsight. This information is for anyone reading this with zero experience and I don't want you to have to learn things the hard way. Anyways I hope this helps:


1.) If you get work done make sure it's through the recommendations of someone you trust. Do not go with any of the big sites like Angi's or Bluebook. Their numbers can be inflated. Like really do your research. We went into it naively and after everything had exploded we did a deep dive and found out most of the reviews were either relatives of the contractor or were outright empty accounts. There were some real ones but they were vastly in the minority here.

2.) Do not spend more then $30,000 per upgrade/draw cycle/etc. Why $30,000 you ask? Because that is the maximum amount that the MHIC will give back to you in cases of the contractor running off. Anything else will be a pro rated amount from a pot of $100k-250. God forbid you go above that or that there are other clients of a fraudulent contractor because the amount you get back will be drastically less then what you put in.

3.) License and bonded means absolutely nothing. Yeah you can maybe get some money back especially when you have put in less then $30k but yeah MHIC the agency in the state of Maryland moves so so painfully slow. They will even in some cases side with the contractor over those that have been hurt. To make you whole is a joke so again for your sake of mind do not go over $30k as that is the maximum amount of relief you will ever get.

4.) If you do go with a bigger budget make sure you get an outside insurance to get the job covered. Do not trust what the contractors says and in my case nobody ever mentioned that you can get a personal Construction Bond. I think some banks will offer this but yeah let someone else do the fighting for you in the case of fraud or the contractor taking the money and bailing. It costs extra but if you are spending $100k plus you can at least sleep well at night because the government agencies like MHIC and the consumer protection agencies are so slow to move and again no one will protect you.

5.) Bankruptcies... ugh you will either get nothing back or pennies on the dollar. Everyone, from banks to other financial institutions will get their cut first and if you are one of many creditors good luck with getting any financial restitution back. Like hundreds of dollars and you will be lucky to get back thousands of dollars. Again the magic number is $30k and you wont be stuck in this nightmare of trying to become whole again....

6.) I cant even begin to tell you how disappointing the office of the attorney general has been... if you get a hungry prosecutor hooray but if you've received the other type of public servant well....yeah... so first off even if a contractor has lied to you in bold text and you're thinking you have a slam dunk case... yeah no. For the case to be beyond the shadow of doubt the contractor will need not just written evidence but also a bloody glove and a self confession that they indeed screwed you over. Outside of that the law sides with the contractor especially if they are an llc. In my case it was pretty clear with no delivered goods, no permits, and a trail of emails and texts that went into hundreds of pages and the prosecutors I had to deal with just kind of shrugged. So while I could get a lawyer and go for civil lawsuits it'll lead to lesson 7...

7.) Lesson 7, restitution is a giant joke. Let me be totally clear and this is something I had zero idea about but restitution is voluntary. You might win the judgement but if the contractor is shady and receives his income through other means there are several loopholes they have. They can either simply open up a new account that the judge doesn't know about, they can be paid under the table, or they can just literally choose to not pay you. Like yeah shouldn't this be illegal but apparently it happens. And God forbid if they declare bankruptcy whatever settlement you were able to scrounge will just be flushed away. The only winners are the lawyers here.

8.)In the cases of bankruptcy if you decide to do it without a lawyer you need to mail the notice of pretrial conference to the defendant yourself. Nobody will tell you this but yeah this is crucial. There are a lot of things that will pop up during the nightmare but you need to check and double check with people and institutions what you need to get done because no one and I mean absolutely no one will help voluntarily. I mean you could get lucky and run into a real passionate investigator that is out for fighting for you because you've been so gravely wounded but there's the other kind of people you'll run into and it is so not good.

9.) When ordering finish materials please make sure you get the manufacturer's receipts. Do no just take the contractor/middle men for their words. In our case we trusted our contractor and came to find out from the distributor that no orders were ever made. Do your own homework and talk to your own contacts. Unless the amount you are buying isn't too expensive you can go on your own. All inclusive was a harsh joke. Please do not fall into the traps we fell into.

10.) Take time for yourself and your loved ones. Don't let a bad situation cloud your thoughts. There is more to life then money and don't do anything you'll regret later. And a final point there is something to be said about your gut feelings. If you don't trust them and your gut tells you to run, run. I know this could have turned out 1000 different ways but if I could go back in I time I would have avoided the whole thing. Our house wasn't huge but we were happy. All we wanted was our dream house and we were so trusting that it feels so stupid in hindsight.

11.) Oh and by the way in our case the contractor had settled multiple cases and had been in deep water already but because they were settled they were considered closed but please, please do a quick case search on your potential contractors. You might save yourself a whole lot of money by doing this:

https://casesearch.courts.state.md.us/casesearch/inquiry-index.jsp

I guess this is it for now. If anything comes up I'll post here. Look I don't know if anyone will read this and I don't know if anyone will ultimately care but please for the love of God don't make the same mistakes we did. Like I don't know who is reading this but from the bottom of my heart I wouldn't want this experience on anyone. So be good, good luck, and I hope you are lucky enough to not have to deal with this but I hope this helps someone out there.

[Anonymous]

OP, I read every word of your post and am taking it to heart. You have done a real public service by posting this. Thank you for taking the time to share your hard won knowledge. I wish you’d never gone through this terrible experience, but I’m grateful for the advice. I need to update my house and didn’t know where to get started.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP, I read every word of your post and am taking it to heart. You have done a real public service by posting this. Thank you for taking the time to share your hard won knowledge. I wish you’d never gone through this terrible experience, but I’m grateful for the advice. I need to update my house and didn’t know where to get started.

Thank you so much for commenting, you've made my day and I wish nothing but the best for you. Please be careful out there!

[Anonymous]

Oh also be super clear with the draw orders during the early stages! Don't trust them at their word, make sure everything is in clear writing. Our contractor kept promising everything and use any vagueness to get out of doing work or not paying for what they verbally promised.

Another giant mistake we made was buying finish materials early. Our contractor had opened up a finish materials show room and insisted that buying early would save us money and time in the long run which might not have been bad advice but when dealing with a large project and alot of unknown variables it became another painful reminder of trusting the wrong people and at the end of the day you need to protect yourself. Again if this was a smaller project it probably would have been minimal damages.

In hindsight I would have broken the project down into smaller projects of max $30k with multiple independent contractors so if one link failed I could still keep moving rather then trusting one company to do it all.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for taking the time to share! It’s so helpful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Thank you for taking the time to share! It’s so helpful.

You're very welcome. Honestly I hope to never see another family going through this. The laws in Maryland are so messed up and there is nothing that really protects the consumers so the only way to protect ourselves is to prevent ever getting into this mess at all. Hopefully one day the laws will change.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for posting! I want to get some work done and am worried about hiring a company bc of the very reasons you state!

The industry is losing money due to these situations.

[Anonymous]

Oh and there's one other thing that I super regretted:

One of the big selling point was the contractor we went with claimed it had all these contacts and that everything would be done through them. Sounds amazing but when you really think about it what happens when that company ends up going bankrupt or stealing your money? I think the old saying of never putting your eggs in one basket is so true especially with home improvements. I had talked to MHIC and its more and more common since the pandemic of contractors just running off so please protect yourselves out there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Thank you for posting! I want to get some work done and am worried about hiring a company bc of the very reasons you state!

The industry is losing money due to these situations.

No problem at all!

Honestly going through what we've been through it has been absolutely scary how we as consumers have absolutely no protections. Like there are some things that can help (like the Guaranty Fund) but anything over 30k is now terrifying to me.

Best of luck and please be careful out there.