I need some advice on dealing with our GC.  Background, we are living in a 1920s row house that needs a lot of work.  We do some stuff ourselves (i.e. the entire kitchen remodel) and some stuff we hire out (i.e. garage, stairs, electrical heavy-up).  We like the GC who built our garage.  He is a nice man who during that project seemed to make sure any problems we identified were addressed.  He has also done some beautiful work on other houses in the neighborhood, so we believe he is a good, skilled carpenter.

We hired him to build us a stairway to the basement plus a laundry closet under the stairs.  We agreed to use our own electrician to pull the electrical and install lights in the stairwell and laundry closet.  The GC is very distracted with some fairly tragic family issues and has assigned the work to a sub who also seems to be generally competent.  When wood work gets done it seems to be good.  BUT… we are running into a bunch of irritating problems, many involving overzealous drywall, such as

1) the flexible dryer duct was mortered directly into the brick wall making any replacement of a ripped duct impossible.  We asked them to fix is and the GC agreed that he did “not know what the workers were thinking when they did that”.  The project sat for 3 weeks and then on Friday some workers returned and did not fix the duct, but rather put a nice lint trapping bend in it and then covered it with dry wall.

2) The drywall guy also patched all the holes our electrician had cut to install switches and lights — these were at the top of the stairs where no other work from the stair crew was called for.  The sub now says he is was planning to charge us extra for doing us the “favor” of patching the holes, which of course the electrician will need to re-cut.

3) Despite our telling them not to drywall in the area under the stairs b/c we were planning to eventually install storage, they covered it with drywall.

4) Our contract calls for unfinished oak treds and risers that we intended to finish ourselved.  On Friday the crew dripped grey brick morter on the raw wood and it looks like the stain will be impossible to remove.

5) Some of the treds appear not to be cut square, there is a small gap between the tred and the wall (perhaps I am being too picky here, and that is normal).

6) Everytime these guys show up to work we end up finding half finished McDonalds meals and drinks all over the basement and yard — or more correctly the dog finds them.

7) we agreed with the sub on a very specific post for the stair, which he said they were going to build.  On Friday the crew arrived an installed a competely different post that why have obviously bought off the rack at Home Depot.

We took away their keys on Friday and called the GC and the Sub and said no one works on this until we have a meeting and get agreement on what is getting done and in what order.  We also told them we though no additional drywalling should occur until everything else is done.

Help!  Are we being taken for a ride?  Should we cut our losses and just fire these guys and hire someone else to finish the job, or do it ourselves, or are these sorts of snafu’s expected?  Did the GC anticipate these kinds of errors when he made the bid?  Or is he losing money everytime these guys have to redo some thing three times?

Any advice on how to proceed to ensure that there is “adult” supervision at the job site and that we actually get the product we originally asked for?

Thanks.

lfisch