I urge you to post your contractor horror story (or stories) as comments to this post. This accomplishes many things:
1. It allows you to share and vent your anger and frustration with many others.
2. It helps to identify patterns of problems so that others can increase their chance of avoiding these problems and having success in the future with their projects. Even though these were undoubtedly very painful experiences, think of sharing them with others as a gift to humankind.
3. It enables you to tell people of contractors to avoid, if their work is really bad. Angie’s List is another venue for this, but the limits in its reporting and the non-public nature of the listing make it much less useful in this regard. If Joe Blow’s Hair Salon (I hope this isn’t a real trade name)messed up your hairdo and you report it to Angie’s List, it isn’t going to make it to google or yahoo. But a comment on this wordpress.com blog will, because wordpress is indexed. There nothing so damning as having a negative comment about your business when someone does a google lookup!
So, comment away, and be sure to include the name and city of the contractor involved if you would like to do that. But note: you must be accurate! A fraudulent public report is libel or slander. And please use good judgment – if you think your contractor might hurt you, don’t post it here, post it to your local police department instead.
