Nightmare Renovations

You just want to improve your house. But sometimes forces conspire to dash your dreams.

(Photographs by David Mahone and Nick Rodrigues)

"Dream home" is probably not the term Nick and Chris Rodrigues would have chosen when they bought their nondescript brick four-family on East Boston's Sumner Street in 2005. But since the brothers were just 24 and 26 years old, respectively, the purchase represented a significant step toward a solid financial future. "We wanted to renovate, rent out the units, and live the American dream," says Nick Rodrigues, who is director of sculpture at the Boston nonprofit Artists for Humanity. "[Chris] had good credit, and I knew how to build things. We wanted a house that would pay for itself."

They had rented out the two upper units and were living in the first floor and renovating the basement apartment when the nightmare part hit them, about a year into the project. "We were in Ireland, vacationing with our family, when the Great Flood happened," Rodrigues recalls. "Halfway through the trip, at like 6 in the morning, my dad wakes us up. There was a note for us, from my girlfriend at the time, in the lobby of the hostel. The note says, 'Water main breaks, house flooded, house condemned. Call immediately.' "

They called immediately. They learned that Boston Water and Sewer, while doing street work unrelated to the Rodrigueses' home renovation, had had a little accident that released a 2-foot gusher. Water cascaded through the house and into the backyard, where it reached the top of the wheel well of Rodrigues's new truck -- which actually got off easy, compared with the neighbor's SUV, which had been swallowed by a newly opened sinkhole in front of the house.

Within a matter of hours, the ex-girlfriend, Amy Carpenter of Jamaica Plain, had gotten all the tenants into a hotel, courtesy of the Red Cross. She found an electrician and a plumber to deal with the systems breakdown -- Rodrigues had only been dealing with a carpenter up to that point. She called the insurance company and had a group of friends come and take the brothers' belongings out of the house so they would not be destroyed by the toxic mold that city inspectors anticipated. She also made a video, which she posted on Rodrigues's website, so that he and his brother could see the damage.

Since there was nothing more they could have done, the brothers stayed in Ireland until the end of their vacation. They sat slack-jawed as they watched "video postcard #1: rats," which opened with three successive screens of captions: "you might want to sit down for this . . . and maybe grab a guinness . . . or twelve." The waterline in the basement reached 5 feet, with wood and other renovation materials floating about. Mud was everywhere. The boilers and hot water tanks were wrecked, and about $3,000 worth of tools lay in ruins. "Hope you're having a good time right now," Carpenter closes in the video with a resigned smile.

Eight months later, in February of last year, the house was officially "uncondemned," says Rodrigues. The brothers will be finishing the first-floor apartment this winter and hope to do the basement by next fall. "It certainly was a relief that we hadn't finished the basement apartment before the flood hit," Rodrigues says, "but, on the other hand, if we hadn't already gutted it, the insurance probably would have paid for the whole renovation." There were moments, he says, when he regretted buying the house, but he also admits, "I have recently stopped fighting the house and learned to love it."

Of course, the majority of renovations go as smoothly as can be expected, notwithstanding contractors who never call back, crucial materials that take six weeks to arrive and then don't fit, surprises like hidden beams that can't be moved, and costs spiraling out of control -- you know, the usual. But some renovation disasters go so far beyond what might be expected that homeowners begin to wonder what they did to deserve such bad karma. It might be the contractor's fault. (The state's Department of Public Safety logged 551 complaints against home improvement registrants and construction supervisor licenses from January to October, an increase over the past couple of years.) A renovation nightmare might be due to overconfidence on the part of an ambitious do-it-yourselfer. It might be an act of nature or simple happenstance. But whatever it is, the homeowner is most assuredly left to wonder why he bothered starting the job in the first place.

In May of last year, David Mahone, a 67-year-old retired machinist, and his homemaker wife, Pauline, 66, hired a contractor for what they thought was a simple project: add a 16-by-20-foot family room with a wraparound deck to their Randolph house and do some kitchen renovations. They had found the man by word of mouth and had done their homework. They got three estimates, and the contractor they ended up hiring had been in the middle, at $62,000. David went with him one day to see three nearby properties he was working on, and Pauline called the Better Business Bureau and found no claims against him.

David Mahone did make one big mistake, though: He gave the contractor money up front. "He gave me a real sob story about how he'd been duped out of $60,000 by other clients he'd done work for," Mahone recalls. "They owed him this money, and he needed to buy materials, and so on." Over time, Mahone gave him about $60,000, always paying slightly ahead of the work done.

In June of last year, a month after he was hired, the contractor left the job and didn't answer Mahone's many phone calls until August. He told Mahone that doctors had found tumors on both sides of his spine but he wanted to come back and finish the job. Mahone agreed, provided a new contract was drawn up specifying exactly what work remained to be done. "He came to work but didn't bring a contract," Mahone says. "But I wanted to get as much work as I could out of him before he started asking for more money." The contractor started asking within a month, though he had worked only a few full days and several sporadic hours in between. In October of last year, Mahone put his foot down. "I said, 'You told me you were going to save me money, and you haven't saved me diddly.' He called back later and said, 'Oh, Mr. Mahone, I talked to my wife, and we've decided you were so good to us when we were really down and out, I'm going to come back and finish the job, and we'll talk money later.' That was the last I heard of him."

The frustrated homeowner figures the amount of work completed was worth about half of what was paid. Mahone soon learned the owners of two of the houses the contractor had taken him to while bidding for the job were also unhappy with him. Mahone went to the police and discovered they were looking for the man, too.

Mahone is filing a claim against the contractor with the Better Business Bureau and is contemplating a lawsuit, but figures the man wouldn't have the money to pay it anyway. Mahone has found a new contractor with great references who says she'll finish the job for about $20,000. "She asked for nothing up front," he says. The homeowner says he's angry about the whole debacle but refuses to let his anger consume him. "You can screw up a whole family by doing something like this," he says of the contractor. "I got people who depend on me. If you walk off with my money, what am I supposed to do?" He says he may go back to work part time to try to make up for some of the money lost.

Often, homeowners in nightmare situations feel victimized not only by the renovation disaster or the contractor, but also by the insurance company, building inspectors, or fate itself. Charlotte Dewey felt all three were conspiring against her when, in 1985, about nine years after she and her family had moved into a late-1890s Cape in Charlemont, a mysterious fire struck. "We lost 45 to 50 percent of the building," the 56-year-old says. "The inspectors never could figure out what happened." Though there was about $90,000 in structural damage, the family, which consisted of her mother, sister, sister's partner, nephew, and a friend, decided to rebuild and add 1,000 square feet to the house. They hired a contractor and moved into a trailer while he worked.

"Several months into it, the money was dwindling, and the bank was getting nervous," recalls Dewey, who's the co-owner of the Charlemont Inn near the home that burned. "The structure was looking lovely, but the contractor was using more money than he said he would, and the bank said we had to stop and get someone else or reassess the situation." Dewey fired the contractor, who had by then framed in the new addition and repaired the fireplace and some fire-damaged sections of the house.

The family moved into the old part of the house -- a lack of funds kept them from completing the new part. But two years later, the floor in the new part collapsed. "We thought it had all been approved by a building inspector," Dewey says. "Everything was signed off. But somewhere along the line, something was not done correctly, obviously."

A contractor friend came by to take a look. When he opened up the floor, he found the original contractor had not excavated or leveled the crawl space properly. The wood he had used to support the floor was not pressure-treated, and in some places, joists were sitting right on the ground. "It was completely rotted. All of the timbers, all of the joists. It was a horrible mess." When she called the contractor, she says, "he blamed the guy who sold him the wood."

After many months of dealing with structural engineers and other contractors, Dewey finally settled out of court for $21,000 -- enough to redo the floors, but not to finish the job. She and her sister tried to save money by doing some of the work themselves, carting out almost 350 wheelbarrowfuls of rocks -- "big ones" -- and dirt by hand to get the crawl space down to a consistent 3 feet. But the family continued to live in the old part of the house, with a temporary wall separating the main living space from the unfinished addition. "We looked at it for 15 years, and it was sadness every day," Dewey remembers.

That sadness was eventually replaced by another, even deeper one, though, when, in 2000, another fire hit and destroyed 90 percent of the house. It took all of the new section, along with most of the old, and was attributed to a faulty heater in the bathroom.

The insurance company wanted them to rehab. "I was like, we are not building back on the same place," Dewey says. "I said to the adjuster, 'Would you really want your mother to live in a house that 10,000 gallons of water came through twice?' So he gave us permission to tear it down." They built a new house with no overlap on the old foundation. "We're at the top of a mountain," Dewey says. "Who knows -- Indian burial ground? We discovered there had actually been another fire in the house in the 1940s, before we lived there. It was too bizarre."

She took no chances with the new house. "There are a lot of spiritual people up on the hills," she says, "and we did call on them to bless the site of the new house. Sometimes when nothing seems to make sense, you go that way." n

Elizabeth Gehrman is a freelance writer in East Boston. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.