fanusa
2010-05-11 07:41:30
- #1
We have a contract that once negotiated the contract with the developer for the land and once the work contract with the builder for the house. Everything was supposed to be completed as early as August last year. Unfortunately, a lot of sloppiness occurred, so that the building permit was only granted 11 months ago. From then on, the builder committed to handing over the key within 11 months. If he does not, he must pay a monthly penalty of 1000 euros to the client. In February, a letter then came with 6 more weeks of delay due to bad weather. It is true that the builder can take bad weather into account. However, we are building according to the [Baugesetzbuch], and thus the bad weather days of the [Deutscher Wetterdienst] for construction weather apply. These did not amount to 6 weeks for a long time, especially since the builder also included his 2 weeks of vacation. Moreover, his craftsmen always worked only from Monday until Thursday noon. They had to work 12 to 14 hours daily on the construction site from Monday to Wednesday, although legally only a maximum of 10 hours per day is allowed. This led to the craftsmen often being exhausted and preferring to lean back and devote themselves to alcohol. Even today there are serious problems because the builder and also the site manager are hardly ever on site. So it happened again that the plasterers should have been working for 2 weeks but preferred to work illegally on other construction sites because there are no controls. Now that it ultimately came out, the site manager was only surprised. However, we bear the costs. Furthermore, work was generally stopped on days like Thursdays from 12 noon and on Fridays, even though the weather was the nicest. Surely, we asked the builder in writing to please change this, but in his response, he only wrote that he had everything under control. So we objected to the 6-week extension of the contractual completion date due to the alleged 6 weeks of bad weather and set a deadline in which the builder should respond. No answer came. We reminded him, set another deadline, and pointed out that if he did not respond, the original completion date would remain. No answer came again. On day X, we then demanded the 1000 euros for the first month since the key handover still had not taken place. The key handover was supposed to be a month later. Then suddenly there was a reaction from the builder. He called and simply shouted into the phone that we were rude. He did not let us speak, threatened an immediate stop of construction work on his part, and finally slammed the phone down. In fact, he instructed his craftsmen on the same day not to continue working in our house from then on. The only problem is, since we were finally supposed to receive the key at the beginning of June, we already terminated our old apartment for the end of July. What now? We are already recorded in the land register. Can we possibly independently commission craftsmen to finish the house and then deduct the costs from the builder? The money has not been fully paid yet. I would really be happy to hear from you. We are completely at our wit's end and simply do not know what to do anymore.