This has been a very long drawn out situation so will try to compress it as much as I can, but any advice would be very much appreciated.
We employed a builder to do various jobs including tile our kitchen floor. We had used the same company previously for our bathroom with no issues.
We live in a small town so this builder works by bringing in other local tradesmen to various aspects of the jobs. At the start of the job, a WhatsApp group is created with all the traders so everyone knows what stage the job is at/who’s doing what.
A guy was brought in to do the kitchen floor tiles and some painting in time for Xmas last year. Very long story short, the work he did was horrendous. I could’ve paid the kids £50 to do a better job.
The main company agreed to come in and fix his work. They took the tiles up etc and then decided that the floor wasn’t right for tiling and they wouldn’t re-tile the floor. The main company are saying that the guy who did it is not their employee, therefore he is liable, not them, and that they took up the bad job as a gesture of goodwill to us.
Citizens advice told us the guy who did the floor counts as a subcontractor so we have to claim the refund from the main company - even though we paid the guy directly, as agreed by all.
We have sent three letter warning if court action giving 14 days to respond in the first two, and seven in the third. The reason we sent so many is because Royal Mail didn’t update the tracking so we don’t have proof of receipt.
Because of this, I also added the third letter to the WhatsApp group as an extra way to show that it had in fact been seen by everyone on the job.
The guy who did the floor has responded by saying that he does not take full liability and has posted a video and several pictures of our dogs in the kitchen with him whilst he is tiling, trying to say that the dogs are what caused his bad work. (It was agreed at the start that the dogs were blocked in one half of the kitchen whilst he tiled one end and then switched).
Clearly he has let the dogs into the area he is working and taken videos/pictures, and I’m actually furious that he has been doing that, making me wonder what else he has taken video/pictures of in our house. He did not have permission and clearly did it on a rare occasion when we weren’t there supervising the dogs. Is he allowed to do that??