Concrete Pour Tomorrow!

The concrete pour was supposed to be last Tuesday, then Thursday, then next Wednesday. Poor Juan is swamped with working 4 jobs and is trying as hard as he can to get to our project, yada, yada, yada. In reality, Juan has the people to work our job, he is refusing to until he gets paid the $15K that Central owes him. When Pat (Central's owner) told me that he would have his own crew out to set the pilings if Juan couldn't get out here by Monday, I realized that Juan is not going to get paid anytime soon.

We have paid Pat for this concrete pour, but with three delays already, lots of lies, and a hurricane heading into the Gulf, I decided that it was time to move on. So we have a new contractor to pour the concrete Saturday morning. Having them come out on short notice, on a job that they've never worked, means that we are paying a premium ($1K). That plus the $800 pump truck means that we're paying close to $2K for work that Pat owes us. But at least we will be moving forward again. If we decide to stick with this new contractor, it will be a cost + 15% contract and I am hoping that the rest of the work will cost less than what we would have owed Pat to finish.

I tried calling Pat yesterday, but nobody answered the phone, as usual. So I sent him a nice e-mail telling him that we were canceling the contract. I'm not sure if we will hear from him again. He might send us a bill trying to get more money out of us, or he might tell us we can't break the contract, or he might say thanks and good luck with the rest of the project. My guess is that one of his crew will show up early one morning to pick up their ladder and that will be the last we hear from them. Hopefully they'll pay some of their bills - I have two subs to check still, but I do know that Pat owes $6.5K of concrete and $1.5K of pump trucks on our project alone. My guess is that he will be filing for bankruptcy sometime in the next couple of months. I just hope that his bond covers our accounts.