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If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you don’t pay for contractor work in your home, while unlikely, this Colorado contractor’s got a visual demonstration for anyone who may try it with him. Amber Trucke stood by filming Terry James Gregory of Dream Home Remodels as he took a sledgehammer destroying her bathroom, tearing up the shower walls and floor. Gregory’s business co-owner Jordan Cazares calmly justified it all by saying they were simply “taking back their stuff.”
“That’s not taking back your stuff, that’s…” Trucke said before trailing off. “It is our stuff, this is how we need to take it back,” Cazares replied. “I’m more than happy to deal with the police, more than happy,” Gregory said out of breath before taking another swing. “More than happy.”
“Let me tell you something: no contractor in the state of Colorado will fix that when they find out I took it back because you refused to pay me,” Gregory tells Trucke, brandishing his saw as he extrapolates. “No one.”
Trucke said she had paid $4,225 of the $7,555 owed to rebuild her shower but didn’t want to pay the rest until she was happy with the final result. The contractors did other work in her house to include fixing two ceiling fans and repairing a back door but it was the shower’s work she wasn’t satisfied with.
“The shower heads had just been put on, and I guess the adhesive had to cure for 24 hours,” she told KRDO. “So I wanted to make sure the plumbing worked, they moved my plumbing around, they moved the drain, I wanted to make sure that worked.”
Her roommate let the contractors back into the house for which she thought was to get materials and not the “retrieval” they chose to do instead. “Watching it just brings tears to my eyes,” Trucke said. “It makes me sick, it makes me scared. This is more than just trashing my bathroom, my sense of safety is gone.”
Cazares says that death threats have been coming her way since the incident saying in a statement, “After several weeks of work for a customer, communication broke down at the end of a project. There was no displeasure expressed, and we proceeded to ask for payment on the project by the end of the day. Communication broke further after that and resulted in our company repossessing a tile shower,” the statement said.
“We regret that this contract went sour. It has never happened before and is not something that is made regular practice. There was several other projects included in the contract that she is also unwilling to pay for, including a vanity, mirror, light fixture, 2 ceiling fans, plumbing work, fixing rotten framing in her walls, and an exterior door replacement.”
Police are now investigating the incident and the company now has 1.5 stars on Yelp.
