I need advice, contractors, insurance, recourse for damage

Ugh. Buckle up, this could get long.

Ten years or so ago, MIL hired a contractor to lift the cabin and have a new foundation built underneath because the existing foundation was crumbling. We’ll call this company ABC Construction. Ten years go by, she passed away, we now own it and want to renovate the old, original part of the cabin and build new on top of the newish foundation. To do this, we hired a different contractor, XYZ Construction to do the work in part because ABC is known in the area for making promises that aren’t delivered, taking forever to pay their subcontractors, etc. We had attempted to get an estimate from ABC to do the work just to have something to compare prices, and he never even got back to us with a quote even after telling us we had waited long enough and would be put right at the top of the list so to speak. The XYZ guy did get us a quote, was always timely and came highly recommended, so when XYZ called us and said they had an opening for this winter, we jumped on it and hired him.

Anyway, in the process of demolishing the old part of the cabin, the current contractor discovered that ABC didn’t install proper flashing up and under the siding on the existing cabin walls and as a result, water had seeped in over the last ten years running down underneath the rock siding on the new foundation, causing significant rot and mold damage to the floor joists, the sheathing, sheet rock, etc. Fixing this damage is going to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of an additional $40-50K on top of what was already a really expensive project.     😭 It’s literally a situation like one of those shows you see on HGTV where the remodeling contractor opens up the wall and says, “Whoa! What the heck is THIS?” None of the damage was obvious from the outside or inside until the old cabin and the deck were taken down. We were very lucky that it didn’t collapse.

DH contacted our insurance company but they said that because it wasn’t the result of a single “event” it isn’t something they would cover and that we should contact ABC’s insurance company. Well, the owner of ABC won’t tell DH which insurance company they use because he doesn’t want to have a claim to be processed against them, and effectively told DH that if we would have hired him to do the job, he would have just fixed the damage and absorbed any additional cost.   DH said, “You had an opportunity to bid the job and never even got back to me with a quote, so we hired the other guy.”

At this point, we have a more than half demolished cabin that we could barely afford the planned renovation to begin with that is now going to be significantly more money to finish (and by ‘finish’, we are talking basic sheet rock, electrical, roof, windows and doors, plumbing, HVAC; no flooring, paint, cabinets, light fixtures, interior trim finishes or anything else, literally a sheet rock shell). DH thinks that the statute of limitations to sue ABC is six years, which would have ended 3-4 years ago. Our new contractor is trying to figure out the most cost effective way to fix it, but the guy isn’t running a charity so it’s going to cost us.

We’re also going to have to completely empty out and remove all the downstairs kitchen and bathroom cabinets and all the rest of our furniture and belongings out of the formerly finished lower level because it will now have to have all the ceilings taken down, the lake side front wall removed and it will basically need to be gutted too to replace the rotted floor joists between the two levels. So that means paying for a storage unit for at least six months on top of bringing even more cabin stuff home to our house, and moving stuff through the snow and up an icy hill now that the exterior timber stairs up to the driveway are gone.

In short, we just really don’t know what to do. We don’t know what our legal options are. We have involved our attorney but even he isn’t sure what we can do because it’s in a different state from where we live. We can’t leave it the way it is, and to finish it even to the bare standards we were planning to would totally wipe out our retirement fund. Borrowing any additional money for this is not an option. We are praying that when it’s all done we won’t have to sell it because we can’t afford it. This cabin has been in his family for almost 50 years. Sigh.

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for bearing with me to get this all out. I can’t believe that a company can build something that badly and then be able to just walk away to work on other people’s houses without having to answer for any of the resulting damage. What is the point of having building codes and standards if no one bothers to check this stuff? 

And to put the cherry on top of our week of misery, we had to send our 12 year old lab over the rainbow bridge yesterday.  We’re both just completely overwhelmed by all of this and incredibly sad.