Fry Classic Construction LLC

email to friends and associatesre: our home/office renovation story hey Everybody, As some of you already know, Claire and I did a very extensive renovation of the house here on Belmont. What you may not know is that for the last two and a half years we have also been involvedin a lawsuit with our contractor. The purpose of this email is to outline our experience and hopefully help you avoid making the same mistakes. Although we won the legal battle,it has been a very time consuming and personally disappointing experience. If you are contemplating doing any remodel/real estate work I think it will be valuable reading. When Claire and I found out that we were expecting in 2009, I purchased this home on Belmont to have more room for our home/office. In the spring we solicited bids for a turn key renovationand reviewed bids from Collier construction, Fry construction, and American Style renovations(ASR). They were all in the 400k range,and so we selected ASR because Ross and Teresa Suber had been long time friends of mine. This was our 1st mistake. Work began in may of 2010. We were in Wyoming all that summer,where Cody was born on june 27th. We came home,hoping/expecting that the house would be complete or 95% complete. It was only 75% done. Also we had trusted the bank to disperse funds according to progress. They had paid out 100% of the contract price. Trusting the bank was our 2nd mistake. The contractor's attitude was flippant and they even had the audacity to ask for more money! To keep them working I paid them another 30k for change orders, even though we were still a long way from done, and they were contractually owed nothing. A side note here, make sure your contract includes appliances and landscaping. We had to pay for this over and above the bid because we had not reviewed it carefully. At this point, I had approx. 450k in the project. Although the house was only about 90% done,we moved in after thanksgiving 2010. That was our 3rd mistake. There was a ton of construction dust that made us constantly sneeze, and the contractors work slowed to a crawl. Fast forward to the spring of 2011: The punch list is still incomplete,we have no permanent certificate to occupy ,and the contractor demands another 33k. I offered to settle for 20k to be rid of them, but they refused,and instead,filed a 70k lien on the property and a lawsuit against me in chancery court. Can you say nightmare? Anyway, I proceeded to hire a lawyer to defend. J. Ross Pepper,of Pepper bros. This was my 4th mistake. Ross Pepper should be a poster child for bad attorneys. After paying him over 10k in legal fees we finally went to arbitration , where he advised me to settle for 18k. Thank god, I fired him and hired Jay Bowen and Will Parsons of Bowen & Unger. That is the only smart move I made in this whole fiasco. ASR had hired a lawyer from Texas and a local lawyer, Philip Robertson. One of their key witnesses was Brady Fry of Fry construction. He was one of the bidders on the property. We had rejected his bid(even though his was lowest) because we had observed shoddy workmanship in his showcase home. In the discovery process, I had asked Fry in an email whether his bid was turn key, to which he of course replied yes.But on behalf of ASR he testified under oath saying : 1) That he never sent a reply saying that his bid was turn key 2) he could find no such email in his sent mailbox, and 3) accused me of fabricating the email. ( providing false evidence,which is a crime.) Why he did this is still a mystery to us. Also during the discovery process,we found out that our architect, Blaine Bonadies, had not supervised the project according to the contract, and we were missing several windows, doors, sinks, and cabinets, corbels, a settee, and it goes on and on. We were shocked. We had trusted him to be sure that the house was built to specs. This was my 5th mistake.At some point and time near the move in date,he completely lost interest in our project. He even tried to charge me to sit down and discuss why he missed so many items in his drawings! We had to depose him. After spending another 50k in legal fees and expert reviews of construction defects,and offering to settle for 0$, we finally went to trial on March 25th of 2012. They presented their case,and being older and not very tech savvy,they called Brady Fry to the stand,where he again claimed there was no such email, and that I had fabricated it. The brain trust of Fry and company were obviously unaware that an electronic record of that very email resided both on the sending and receiving servers. Fry was eviscerated on the stand by my attorney, and their case fell apart in short order. This is a story long on villains and short on heros, but I can't say enough about what a great job Will Parsons and Jay Bowen did to milk some justice out of this mess. Where Ross Pepper had advised that I PAY THEM 18k, the court ordered that THEY OWED ME 96k plus legal fees and expenses of 120k, and their lien was removed from the property. case # 11-674-III Davidson county chancery court. In summary,I would say that you should thoroughly investigate any professional person you hire,and when it comes to construction,I would not implicitly trust anyone. There are obviously a lot of bad apples out there. I learned the hard way. I hope this helps you avoid my mistakes.

My only issue was that our first solution, which was rebuffing and adding an extra coat of polyurethane, was not going to work because of how the floors had been kept up by the previous seller, but this was something that Fry Construction didn't realize until halfway through the job. If you do get your floors redone, make sure you TEST a small portion of the floor in one of the corners to see if you have any complications with just rebuffing.