House Repairs

This is attorney Hunter Cavell coming to you from Solon, Ohio, and outside of Cleveland. And today I want to talk with you about home repairs. It’s getting to that time of the year, spring is in the air, lots of rain, which might mean you’re finding lots of leaks, which might mean a new roof, new basement, new siding.

Now with that, hopefully everything goes well. But sometimes contractors may miss something and you have a leak. Worse, you might have already paid for the entire thing for the contractor, and he either tells you that it was repaired correctly or worse, just not even answering your phone call.

So, what can you do? There are a few options. Unfortunately, a lot of contractors that do have shoddy work. That’s not all of them. There are many reputable ones, but the shoddy ones probably don’t have any money. Luckily, to work in certain cities, they have to register. And to register, you have to have a surety bond, which means they have to put aside money or buy a policy that says their work will be up to code.

So what that means is if you can’t get a hold of the roofer or the person installing your basement siding and you can’t even sue them, or you’re afraid they don’t have money, you can make a claim on the bond. What you do is call the city or municipality where you are and find out the name of the bond company. And also you would need to get an inspector to your house to say that, no, the roof or the basement is not up to code. Now, you don’t need to prove that they intentionally did anything wrong, just that it’s not up to code. As soon as that happens, you make a claim on the bond and hopefully you’re paid. There are other ways to go about it, such as going to court under the CSPA, which I’ve talked about in relation to automobile cases and things of that which are very consumer friendly. So if you have a leak, a roofing issue, or you need some other help, or if, God forbid, roofer slapped a mechanics lien on your house and you need help getting taken care of that, give us a call at (440) 940-6441 or email me here. Thank you.