Hi,
Looking for advice. We are 2/3 of the way through a disastrous home renovation with a builder... To begin with everything was fine & the quality of his work was good but then we got hit by a 2 month delay with the windows due to Covid (which we ordered.) We told the builder that he could go and work somewhere else whilst we waited but he insisted on staying and carrying on but dropped the team working on the build down to 2 people each day and sometimes just 1 person... He also started getting demanding and saying that we would need to pay him extra for bits that we didn't include in our original contract because the job was costing more than he initially quoted for & taking longer. A couple of these demands we paid just to keep him happy.
Roll on January this year and after shouting at my partner in the face about the fact that the kitchen had taken 3 weeks to fit & was costing him extra because of the amount of time it has taken (it was his fitter who he had recommended to us who made multiple mistakes causing it to take longer) he disappeared 3 weeks ago and we haven't heard from him since. We have sent him 2 whatsapps and an email asking if he is ok and he hasn't bothered to reply or pick up our calls. We finally got through to one of his contractors he had do some plastering for us who told us that he was fine but would be sending us an email because there were 'some issues'. This was a week ago now.
All of his tools are still here and there is a lot of work left to do... we don't know what to do because it's going to cost us more to finish than the rest of the sum of the contract that we have with him. We are happy to cover this just to get him out of our hair, but we don't know where we stand legally with the contract... can anyone advise?
Thanks