Have you already paid the contract in full or withheld enough money (as leverage)?
If you have withheld payment, set written deadlines for defect correction, then cancel the contract after fruitless expiry. Assign the work to third parties – done. Let the parquet layer sue for payment. Still, you will have to advance payment for your lawyer (estimated under 1K given the volume?).
If you win, you will get that back too; if there’s a settlement, you’ll be stuck with it. If you lose, you also have to pay his lawyer. This is not and should not be legal advice from me, it merely reflects my current experience with a lawsuit in the construction sector.
If you have already paid everything, I would get an offer for defect correction and then weigh whether a legal dispute is worth it. For defect correction under 1K, I (my personal opinion) would not waste my time on it and just pay it and then enjoy the nice staircase. For your information: my lawsuit concerns about 20K and I got sued for payment because fortunately enough (7K) was withheld as leverage.
So, we have paid everything; the contract was from January 2023. We were dissatisfied with all the work, but we didn’t want any more stress since the move was delayed anyway. In January, after the work was completed, we asked for a discount because the seams on the doors and windows were cut crookedly and were not sufficiently filled with cork. The parquet layer refused this with the argument that he could straighten the seams, i.e., enlarge them and thus “rework.” Of course, we did not want that—who wants seams over 1.5 cm thick at the doors? The entire stairwell looked terrible, the freshly painted walls were damaged, the stair nosings were extremely dirty, full of glue residues, the seams in the stairwell were not clean and extremely thick. In some places, the baseboards were not flush. The wooden stairs did not fit exactly, although they measured the steps several times; in some places, there was too much space and the seams were thicker. All that plus the unfriendly, uncooperative behavior of the parquet layer we somehow accepted, repaired the problem areas ourselves, and even resigned ourselves to it. About two weeks ago, suddenly there were thick stains on the stair nosings caused by the glue. So six months after the completion of the work, we contacted the parquet layer again and asked for a statement. He did admit that the glue had caused the stains, but said it was our fault because we did not varnish the stair nosings?!! That was not his problem. We responded and sent a letter setting a deadline for rework (
replacement of the stair nosings, not just varnishing). So far, he is ignoring us. Silence. We asked a third party company for a cost estimate. Damage control, i.e., just varnishing, would be around €2000 (31 stair nosings). According to the third party company, the parquet layer did not “block off” the stair nosings, which caused the stains. These stair nosings are finished, coated components in different decors that are not to be painted. This was confirmed again by our building surveyor, site manager, and the third party company. We will now seek legal advice and this time we will list all the botched points, because we've had enough. We are talking about a contract sum of €25,000 with a “master craftsman company.”