Hi,
My name is Christine. My husband and I worked very hard over the last five years to be able to purchase a small home for our family. We have two young boys, both of whom have autism. They are wonderful boys, but the road has been difficult for us at times. Apartments quickly became noblonger possible due to our oldest boy’s noise level during vocalizations. It was nothing he could control, but we were forced to find other arrangements. In order to keep him in his school district and maintain his therapies, we ended up cramming all of us into a tiny two bedroom trailer. It also soon became a problem living there when we asked to put up a small fence for his safety. By last spring we knew we had no choice other than finding a home of our own that we could make safe for them. Even after all the saving and planning, our budget was small for the school district we live in. We ended up finding a small house that needed a lot of work, but it had an amazing yard and really felt like home when we walked in the door. We used a 203k loan to buy our house and closed on November 10,2016. Even though she was in rough shape, I was in love. My children finally had their own rooms and their own yard. We were so excited to get started on our renovations and make our houwe beautiful again. We unfortunately didn’t know the first thing about construction or how to tell a good contractor from a bad one. We ended up with the worst contractor ever. He damaged our house, punched holes in our walls and stole almost three thousand dollars from us. The worst part was he subcontracted our roof to a friend whom he said was a roofer. He was not. On December 23, 2016 the “roofer” climbed down from the roof and told us he was going to get a tarp and would have to tarp the roof for the night since it was going to rain and we had several holes in the decking,and would be back in the morning. I left and took my husband to work. It was dark when i got back, so I wasn’t able to see the tarp, but assumed he had put it on as he had done before. I woke up on Christmas eve to my youngest son crying and yelling “oh no! It’s raining!”. I thought he was seeing rain from his window and went to comfort him. He’s afraid of rain because of his sensory issues. Oh how wrong I was! I walked into his room to a horrific scene. His ceiling fan was on, the glass under the lights was overflowing with a brown disgusting water, the fan portion was on and spraying the disgusting water all around his room…completely saturating his freshly painted walls, his brand new bed and covering my poor son! We put buckets out, started cleaning the water, our son, and shut off the electric to his bedroom and we started hearing dripping in the livingroom. Water was pouring like a faucet from half of our ceilings upstairs. We have had partial collapses of ceilings in almost every room. It pours down into our house every time it rains. We called the guy to find out what happened. It turned out he didn’t want to spend the $50 for a tarp, so he didn’t tarp the roof…he just left it exposed. All our Christmas presents, our tree, our new furniture is all ruined. My brother who was a retired roofer told me not to worry, that he was coming to visit after christmas and he would fix the roof for me. Very unfortunately he passed away from a heart attack a few days after Christmas. We have tried everything we can think of, we just don’t have the funds to replace the roof as we already gave this man thousands to do it. We are having water come in on almost a daily basis…every single time it rains or snows. The “roofer’s” insurance has refused to cover the roof in any manner and will only replace a portion of our possessions. We have put everything we have into this home, all our money, countless hours of painting and any improvements we can do on our own to make it into a safe and happy home for our boys. At this point we would just settle for a dry home. We have exhausted every option available to try and make that happen, but it is not within our physical ability, nor currently in our financial ability. My brother had been my only hope and sadly he is no longer with us. We are hoping and praying for a miracle at this point. Every time it rains our house sustains more damage and all we can do is sit and watch our dream be destroyed. I cannot express what this would mean for us.