Robert Bell

Horrible experience with this contractor! My wife and I hired Mr. Bell on April 21st to rebuild our main drain to sewer. The total cost was to be $10,000, a reasonable price for this type of work. At that time we made a first payment of $4600.00. He pulled first permit on May 1st. He says that the excavator was in need of repair and had to delay the job. Well since the machine was fixed, Mr. Bell required us to pay a second installment of $4600.00 on June 20th in order to commence the "second phase" of the project. Upon receiving this second payment, he said to us that he was going to pull the second permit and come back and finish job but instead he has basically disappeared! He has lied, over and over again, about coming to work and has only showed up once and that was a 6:30 pm start on a Saturday night, which gave him only a few hours to work-not nearly enough time to do anything substantial. Upon our growing panic, he has stopped answering our calls altogether. Now raw sewage is backing up into our basement because this contractor has taken over two months to complete a job that takes an average of four days to complete. Not to mention that when we informed Mr. Bell of the sewage and he replied back via text (the way he commutes with his customers the most, not actual talking) that he would come out the following morning with a snake. Well here it is nearly a week later since we contacted him about the sewage last Thursday evening, June 29th, and still no one has handled the sewage in our basement which keeps getting worse the more we use our household water, such as toilet flushing, laundry, showers, etc.
My wife is on her 40th week of pregnancy and yet we are spending this time scrambling, not knowing whether to sue this guy, find another contractor or what. This is time we would have hoped to be calming before the birth of our first child. Not to mention we informed Mr. Bell that this job had to be completed by end of third week of June, last week of June the absolute latest. He replied no problem. I'm so sick of contractors with horrible communication skills and or who are liars.
We called the city today (7/5/17) to check if Mr. Bell applied for the second permit-the one he had to have $4600 right away for-and he had not applied. Now he has had this second payment for 2 weeks and has not commenced any action to move forward with our job. We have paid out a total of $9200.00 so far and to date stand with sewage in our basement, a backyard all torn up making access to our garage very difficult and a huge bulldozer in it. It is summer and we want to enjoy our yard but this unfinished mess makes that difficult.
While I understand that running a construction company requires overhead costs to keep machines running, and that contractors have to keep hustling to keep a steady flow of capital, two and a half months and counting, for this job, is totally unacceptable, especially when the contractor does not have the decency to return calls regarding urgent matters due to their negligence.