Help Restore a Veteran's Home and Hope

I want to publicly thank all of those who have reached out to aid me in my pursuit you will never know how difficult this was to need to ask for help.

My goal is to raise enough money to hire a Veteran supportive attorney to take on Larimer County for its poor construction oversight practices, and it's lack of a mandatory requirement for general contractors to have insurance to cover all construction defects proven for which he/she are responsible for supervising. Finally I want to be able to take the general contractor to court for his deceptive construction practices while holding him liable for all of his contractual responsibility and his post construction written promises to set things right.

SUMMARY: Over the past six years, I have burned through my retirement fund of $750,000 in an effort to get the home we contracted for properly constructed, only to find out recently that the General Contractor (GC) is not required to carry insurance to cover damages done to our home through his lack of oversight or for the shoddy work done by his subcontractors and their 3rd and 4th order subcontractors. The cost to repair the house and set it right is listed by experts as $831,000; however, we were recently forced to settle for $500,000 from the GC required to fix all of the issues and does not recover our legal fees.

I reached out to the Colorado State and Larimer County Attorney Generals seeking justice in this case without a response from either. I have reached out to my district's State House and Senate representatives requesting their support and asking them to sponsor a bill requiring General Contractors to take out insurance covering all aspects of the work they are contracted to do, when it is proven that there are real issues, should their subcontractors (to include 3rd and 4th level subs) don't have the insurance to cover the damages incurred.

BACKGROUND: By July of 2019, I had completed 31 years of active duty serving from Vietnam to Desert Shield/Storm (1966 - 1997) and many operations in between. I served an additional 22 years as a senior advisor to combatant commanders in Bosnia, Australia (East Timor), Afghanistan, and Iraq. Nearing 70 years of age, I needed to retire and be closer to our kids and grandkids, so we purchased 40 acres in Wellington, CO, a few miles south of Cheyenne, WY, in 2016. My goal was to retire and move my beekeeping operation to this area. My wife, on the other hand, had arranged with her Virginia-based company to work remotely on taxes for her clients.

We originally hired a general contractor (GC) to build a custom home for us. This contractor arranged for our design plans to be drawn up and coordinated with a structural engineering firm to draw up the structural engineering design. By mid-2017, the GC dropped us in favor of working for a developer. Our realtor put us in touch with James (Jim) Gibbs of JGIBBS Construction, LLC, who agreed to take on our project.

Just prior to our signing a contract with JGIBBS, I had service-related injuries that put me in Johns Hopkins for surgery. It was clearly stated to me that a wheelchair was in my future. This information was clearly communicated to the GC who, after signing the contract, verbally acknowledged my request to ensure the house was constructed to allow smooth wheelchair access so that when the time came, I wouldn't have to go through extra expenses I might not be able to afford. This was clearly detailed in the structural engineering design plans stamped and approved by Larimer County.

Our contract stated the project would be completed no later than December 2018. During the period between signing the contract and our anticipated move-in date, both my wife and I continued working at our regular jobs in Virginia. We would make periodically arranged visits with the GC. Each visit showed us that there were deviations from our requests for wheelchair access, and each time this was brought up, we were either assured that this would be addressed toward the end of the construction phase or as we might need it afterward.

The bank informed us the house would not be ready to move into in December 2018, even though the GC promised us that we would be able to move in after Thanksgiving that year. We moved my wife into our daughter’s home, located about a mile to the west of the project site, so that she could start her tax preparation work. I remained in Virginia working and waiting for an expected notification that the project was coming close to completion so that I could put our home in Virginia on the market and prepare to move our household goods to Colorado. We received a certificate of occupancy in early June 2019. This was a delay of 30 days past the promised date, which caused our household items to be stored in the 3-bay garage.

When the house was handed over to us, the GC apologized for the shoddy work his crews performed and promised to make things right. He would use statements like this each time minor or significant issues were discovered. Something he never did. These promises, written and verbally communicated, never came to fruition and forced us into litigation before the end of the designated contract period of agreement.

The roof was installed incorrectly, allowing water to come in behind the siding onto the porch but not into the house. Vents were installed incorrectly, allowing water to come into the house, damaging the ceilings and floors. Windows were not installed correctly, allowing inches of dirt to come into the house at all four corners of the double-hung windows, and the room over the garage gets inches of icing on the walls when the temperatures drop below freezing. These are just a few of the issues we are living under.

At this writing, I have spent my entire life savings of $750,000 trying to pursue justice only to find out, after years of heel-dragging and legal manipulations, the GC does not have insurance to cover the breach of contract nor any of the other work he made the decision to change without coordination with us.

Under duress, wording I was told I couldn’t say in a communication back to my attorney when told what the settlement was going to be, we were out of money and now being told that the maximum amount of money we could receive would be $500,000 and no more. We didn't have the additional $100,000 plus to take the GC to court where, by Colorado law, we were allowed to seek $3.9M for loss of use. Instead, we are ¾ million dollars in the hole and not receiving enough money to restore the house.

Evidently, neither Colorado nor Larimer County require GCs to carry an insurance policy to cover the work they are contracted to do, whether they physically touch the project or source it out to a subcontractor, especially when the work is proven to be faulty. In addition, Larimer County does not apparently concern themselves with doing thorough project inspections to ensure work is done to code and that changes made from a county-stamped and approved document are followed or there is approval for the changes as directed in those documents.

Now, at this writing, my wife has been diagnosed with advanced dementia and Alzheimer's, and we may be forced to sell the property and house because it will be too much to manage the place on my own. I had hoped to have 40 acres of pollinator-friendly plants fully functioning for my hives by this time. Instead, all of my retirement money has been lost due to a legal system that is intended to rape the consumer instead of ensuring they are protected.

Any support anyone can afford to help me with would be very much appreciated.