Even a ten-year old playing with Building Blocks can tell that 1012 18th Street in New Town is an unfinished construction zone. In spite of Judge Rosemary Jones' November 24, 1999 ruling that the "formal renovation" of this private residence is complete, windows filled in with cement stick out from the living room walls like abstract paintings squared off against bleaker, gray concrete. Front doors don't fit newly cemented arches.
Electric wires dangle from eaves outdoors. Cracked stucco walls are roadmaps to the back of the house where aluminum window frames bulge under pressure from a new roof.
"The roof is too heavy, and it leaks. The double doors in the Florida room, which is also unfinished, were pieced together and installed backwards on the wrong frame and now, pools of water stand on the floor every time it rains," said John Tappan, who, with his partner David Steinhoff, retired to Key West in 1993 and bought the house at 1012 18th Street in 1996.
"Mold ruined the drywall— as well as our health— and we had to pay another contractor $1,000 to legally remove the rotting ceiling in the Florida room. It's been a nightmare. What started out with a renovation contract for $47,872 has cost us almost our entire life-savings of $250,000, and we still owe the lawyer for McKillip Builders $23,000."
Tappan says the renovation project began in September 1996, and following a series of disagreements about the quality of the work, it stopped in July of 1997. Even the lawsuit he brought against the contractor, McKillip Builders has left Tappan and Steinhoff "high and dry" with issues unresolved.
"This happens to other people, too; the construction business is competitive and everyone's looking for the lowest bid, but when you get the lowest bid, it's usually because something was left out," said Paul Mitchell, the licensed engineer who designed the renovations for Tappan and Steinhoff.
"You'd be shocked by the number of complaints the contract licensing board gets in Tallahassee."
According to Mitchell, even if someone is knowledgeable of construction and understands requirements related to building codes, the City of Key West and Monroe County's permitting process is complex.
"The system and permits are as hard to read as chemistry, and it doesn't work for the Average Joe," said Joseph Valdez, president of Republic Builders, Inc, a general contractor and roofing business in Key West.
"An application costs about $1,500 just to begin. Then sometimes you need updated survey's, variances, blue prints and people are angry at the building and code enforcement departments even before the project starts. It's a real aggravation when you only have a fix-up job budget of $5,000."
Before he started Republic Builders, Valdez was the general manager for McKillip Builders. He resigned that position in February 1997, five months before the Tappan/Steinhoff project shut down: "I was on that job during the framing of the roof, and those two guys have legitimate issues," said Valdez.
Because Valdez "expects to be subpoenaed" in the on-going lawsuit, he declined making specific comments about McKillip Builders or the construction work that took place at 1012 18th Street.
"It's hard for individuals to pick out reliable builders, unless you know them personally, and even then, we can't guarantee you won't have problems," said John Jones, Key West's assistant city manager. "We have a list of licensed contractors, but their turnover is a people problem just like other businesses here."
Homeowner horror stories abound. "What should have taken a week, took nine months to put on a new roof and rewire some electric after Hurricane Georges," said one man.
I empathize: A $2,500 patch job on my roof following that storm is still unfinished. But reputable, small contractors say that when work is plentiful after major storms, they frequently have to split work crews to handle the influx of business. Sometimes, the need for warm bodies overrides the need for competence and the stuff of Carl Hiassen novels looms larger than life:
"We couldn't get to the job site the day we were scheduled because my supervisor was on a binge", or "My finish carpenter doesn't have a green card, after all."
Then there's out-and-out fraudulent work ethics. Says one attorney who used to handle construction litigation: "The business lends itself to hidden flaws; to save money, maybe two-by-fours are spaced 36 inches apart instead of every 24 inches, and nobody knows the work isn't being done to spec until the building begins to fail."
This was the case at Truman Annex's Harbor Place Condominiums. Sources say that concrete columns were supposed to be vertically reinforced with steel, but contractors allegedly "put pieces of steel rebar at the tops of the columns to look like it ran throughout the columns. It didn't, and there was enough dissatisfaction and enough money among the condominium owners to take the contractors to task."
Consequently, several contractors went out of business and a multi-million dollar settlement supported the new construction on that building.
But John Tappan and David Steinhoff don't have unlimited funds, or support from other homeowners, to take on "the system".
"We selected McKillip Builders because Patrick Derriso worked there and we wanted him to do the work for us," said Tappan, who walks me into the Florida room by parting the massive plastic sheets where doors should be. "Pat started the project, then Odes McKillip moved him to other jobs. We complained that the work was not being done properly and that we didn't want the damaged materials the construction company kept using, but sometimes weeks would go by before anyone would come to the house to do anything at all."
Then, Tappan says, McKillip redesigned the Florida room roof that Engineer Paul Mitchell originally designed— but McKillip didn't have Mitchell sign off on it. Instead, McKillip had another engineer, Joel Rosenblatt, seal the new roof structure plans without either Tappan's or Mitchell's knowledge.
"I don't understand how the contractor did what he did. If I tell a contractor `no it's not right', it usually gets corrected," said Mitchell. "McKillip called me one time to make a change on the front columns, but I never approved any changes on the back roof. It sagged from the first time I saw it, and I said it absolutely would not work. Apparently, McKillip hired another engineer to approve this new design."
The issues are further complicated because Tappan and Steinhoff asked McKillip to do additional work not in the original bid, and by July1997, costs surpassed the original contract fees.
"By this time, we had already paid McKillip more than $52,000, and McKillip said we still owed him another $19, 768 even though the work was plainly unfinished," said Tappan. "McKillip filed a lien on the property and stopped working."
According to Tappan, after McKillip abandoned the project, Tappan hired Rick Gegorek of Associated Home Builders to inspect his home. Gegorek agreed with what Mitchell and others who had been involved with the job claimed: the work was not acceptable, and it was unfinished. Litigation ensued.
Tappan says McKillip hired two "experts" to inspect the property; Paul Cates, a builder, inspected the site and agreed that work was unacceptable and unfinished. Garland Wilson, an engineer, did computer evaluation of the roof and determined that the roof was not constructed according to plans, was not structurally sound, and it did not meet building code standards even though the then-director of the Key West Building Department, Tom Forbes said the work did meet the city's codes.
"All this information was apparently irrelevant to Judge Rosemary Jones. And what's more, our Lawyer, Diane Covan, asked Judge Jones to recuse herself because the judge made sarcastic remarks that suggested she was biased against gay men," said Tappan.
But, in 1999, Judge Rosemary Jones ruled in favor of McKillip Builders.
"We've gone to the appellate court, to the state's licensing board; we have new information from Key West's building department that says none of the work was ever inspected and approved, but we're getting nowhere," he said.
Engineer Paul Mitchell wraps it up this way: "John and David are not your typical client; they continue to live on a construction site. Nothing was ever finished on that job. I haven't charged them a dime since the original drawing, and I keep doing reports; the last version was a couple of months ago."