Contractor Broke Foundation. Must I Allow Him To Do The Repair?
I hired a general contractor with a lot of concrete experience to replace my driveway and back patio. The back stoop turned out to be 4ft solid concrete and proved too difficult to break with a jack hammer. He chose to use a skid-steer with a much larger jack hammer tool on it. He used a saw to cut a line parallel to the house. When the jack hammer finally got the stoop to split, the force and weight caused severe damage to my basement foundation wall.
We agreed that if a structural engineer determined the repair could be performed by replacing the blocks, he would be allowed to perform the repair himself, but if it required extensive excavation and bracing, it would require a foundation repair company to do the work.
A structural engineer determined it requires excavation to the footing, bracing, inspecting the drain tile, and waterproofing from the outside.
He's now changing his story and claiming he can do all the work himself. I don't trust him to do a good job based on our previous discussion of his experience/skill limits. He only wants to do the work to save money, but I also think he's opening himself up to more future liability than he should.
Wisconsin has a Right to Cure law that applies in the case of "defects", but it's unclear to me that those damage qualifies as a "defect" by the law.
Assuming I get him to own up to the damage being his fault, do I need to allow him to do the work, or can I insist that a qualified repair company do the repair?
Location: Wisconsin
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