Abruzzo project: Villa Eventhyr
The story of how easy it is, during a renovation, to confuse trust with professionalism.In other words: save yourself from an "&"
Part IV
The retaining wall:
We are not construction specialists, but we have already built our houses in Poland, which involved direct supervision of every phase of the work. However, we were used to reliable companies that perform their work as agreed with the client, in the best possible way and at the price established at the beginning of the project. We were starting to realize, however, that in our relationship with the contractor, something was not working as it should.
In the end, we decided not to sign the contract and not to pay additional invoices that we deemed unjustified, as they were not based on either the proposed contract or the economic offer, which we considered excessive compared to the planned work.
As part of the advance already paid for services that we had never actually requested, the contractor was supposed to rebuild the retaining wall that he himself had demolished at the beginning of May. However, we had to wait about two weeks for the work to start.
When the construction site finally resumed, on the first day only one worker showed up who, at least from the images of the surveillance system, seemed more occupied on the phone than in preparing the work or reconstructing the wall. Naturally, that day was probably counted as a regular working day.
In the following two days, however, the work actually picked up pace.
The retaining wall was supposed to be one of the simplest elements of the entire project. Soon we realized that nothing was as simple as it seemed.
The work was progressing slowly and, as time went on, modifications began to appear compared to the initial agreements. The contractor did not intend to reconstruct a part of the demolished wall, but to replace it with an earthen slope, while a small wall next to an olive tree was supposed to serve as a stabilizing element for the entire structure.
More and more often we had the feeling of losing control of our own project.
The turning point came when we requested an inspection by the surveyor to verify the correct execution of the retaining wall and the drainage system and, at the same time, we decided to suspend any further work until our return to Italy.
At that point, the wall had only been completed halfway and, in our opinion, in a manner that was not in line with either our expectations or the agreements made. As for the drainage system, little was known. We then asked the surveyor to carefully analyze the work and verify its compliance with good construction practices.
We thus began to ask ourselves a question that until that moment we had tried to avoid:
"Are we really sure we want to continue this collaboration, even at this point?"
The answer came more quickly than expected.
The work was interrupted, the contractor left the construction site with no intention of completing even that phase of the work and returned part of the advance paid, an amount that had little to do with the figures discussed earlier. The costs of materials and labor were calculated according to criteria that were not clear, without a precise breakdown of the calculations being provided.
In the end, he even stopped responding to messages on WhatsApp.
We found ourselves alone with a still incomplete but already surprisingly expensive wall. There was also a feeling that was hard to ignore: we had certainly lost six months and a certain amount of money, but we had probably avoided many future expenses that were difficult to control and work that would likely have been done differently than we had imagined.
As a commentary:
In medicine, one of the most difficult decisions is not to start a therapy, but to stop it, especially when time, energy, and hopes have already been invested.
The natural temptation is to simply continue because a long way has already been traveled.
Sometimes, however, the biggest mistake is not losing a few months of work, but adding more to a project that has long since stopped going in the right direction.
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