Heartbreak

Hi, My name is Sophie and I am fundraising for my husband who has been driving semi trailer trucks for the last 25 years, working harder than most people I know to help keep a roof over our heads and support his children growing up. While for the most part not being able to be present with his family because he is nearly always on the road earning an income. Working up to 80 hour weeks to provide for his family, with usually no more than 3-4 hours sleep a day.

It is these difficult and challenging circumstances which lead him to have a seizure in June this year, where he had his commercial truck license cancelled until he is cleared by specialists to return to work. We had to borrow $50,000 to help support us during this time, as I was only working a casual job and doing as many hours as I could.

With some of the money we borrowed we decided to try and finish off our house so it would be presentable for sale, in case Phil wasn’t cleared to return to work, and therefore unable to provide enough income for us to keep our house. In the process of fixing up the house as much as we could we used a tradie website to employ a builder to help replace cracked tiles in our bathrooms and laundry.

The builder quoted an initial price for the job but when he started he found that all the floors and walls were water damaged due to not being waterproofed properly when the house was built. So he quoted us $60,000 for a full renovation in order to fix the rooms. Work started and he replaced the walls and floors but insisted on another $11,400, a total of $71,400, to finish covering all the materials and labour.

We checked his builder’s license on the Government websites and it was clean. So we payed the full amount of $71,400 to get the job finished in case we had to sell the house to help support ourselves until Phil could return to work.

The builder ended up refusing to come back and finish the work after doing just the walls and floors, so we were left with no bathrooms and no laundry. Having to shower at the local pools and use a laundromat. This continued for 3 months while we tried to negotiate with the builder to return and finish the work. We later found out that he had done the same thing to numerous people in Sydney, and is now being charged with 28 offences by the police.

We are currently showering in a shower tent and have a temporary washing machine set up, but have no functional bathrooms and laundry, and have lost all of our money to this builder, with no way of recovering it.

Phil is still waiting for specialists to clear him, and has mounting medical and household bills piling up, as well as no means to borrow more money to fix our house. We are now in a position where we cannot sell our house, in case something goes wrong with Phil medically and he cannot return to work, as the house is not functional.

I am asking people please if they can help us out to help cover our bills until Phil can return to work ? This has been a totally heartbreaking situation having our family home gutted, that we have slugged over for more than 20 years to try and pay off and make ready for sale in case of an emergency. We feel like all our options to help Phil in his time of need have been taken away, and ask that you could please help him to get back on his feet, so that we can try to pay off all this money we borrowed and also save more to finish our house so that it is liveable and able to be sold again.

Any help would be so much appreciated if you feel like this is a worthy cause.

Thank you for listening to our story, I really appreciate it.

Sophie.