I was away on business for six weeks, leaving Ms. Lowball to fend for herself on my remodel, her remodel, the investment property and another investment property I had recently acquired. She was a little stressed. However, as she was sick and tired of excuses and delays, she hired a LifeStyles Preferred contractor to work on my most recent investment home.
Low and behold, he was done rehabbing that property in two weeks. He did an amazing job. We had invoices for everything, everything was paid on time and we had zero drama. That made Ms. Lowball quite happy with the second contractor and even more unhappy with the first…our good ‘ol buddy.
So, as summer was heating up to the crescendo of August, Ms. Lowball’s temper went with it. She fired our buddy and began working direct with the subs.
However, our buddy was begging to finish my floors, seeing as he had already purchased the material. The straw that broke the camel’s back, however, with Ms. Lowball was when he asked her for a draw “for the painter” seeing as he was “upside down on her job.” She replied, “How can he be upside down? I gave him half of the money upfront and he has only completed half of the work. He doesn’t need a draw. If you want to give him one, take it out of the $500 deposit I gave you.”
Ms. Lowball did this because she knew something fishy was going on.
Ms. Lowball was right.
The next day, I saw MY FLOORS (which I had already bought and paid for) “for sale” on Facebook.
WTF?
Ms. Lowball caught it, and immediately wanted to call him out on his lie. (We are way past the point of counting at this point) She replied on the thread and asked him how much he wanted for OUR floors. He never got back to her. Within a few hours, the post was deleted.
We knew what was up with that icehole. He didn’t have the capital, and had already spent our deposits (on what we don’t know), which is why he couldn’t pay his subs.
So we worked with the subs directly. However, the subs were too nice to tell their good buddy (and ours) to shove off. Because of this, he managed to keep weaseling his way back into each house from time to time, and while he knew Ms. Lowball was perturbed, he kept texting me, thinking we were still friends.
Not in my book.
Finally, the first rental was done, Ms. Lowball hired someone else to do her house, and we had floors.
We both breathed a sigh of relief. All the worst was behind us now.
Or so we thought.
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