Teller County Building Department

Re: Response to Barbara Robbins letter to Teller County building Department dated May 17, 2001. Permit #00-9087 – John & Anne Hart 53 Panorama Circle, Florissant

To: Ms. Janet Lloyd

This letter is prompted by our discovery of a letter sent by Barbara Robbins of NorthStar Construction requesting her release from this project when she was notified that we had terminated her services. Even though we were shown as cc at the bottom of this letter we never received a copy. I don't believe Barbara Robbins ever intended for us to see it due to the many misstatements and distortions through the letter.

We do agree that there were three major issues of rock, septic (rock) and exceptionally cold weather of only two weeks. However, the most delay was caused by her inability to manage this project correctly and slowing the project down due to whatever reasons she chooses to keep to herself. We have our opinions as to why she chose to do this but at this time do not want to divulge them as we are seeking legal advice.

The timeline that she listed in her letter to you has many dates wrong. We wonder sometimes if we are talking about the same project. Rather than bore you with dates that are within a day or two we will only show the dates that are substantially different in our records.

Item f: why did it take 9 days to have engineering turned into county for building permit? Report ready on 9-11 and received by Planning department on 9/20
Item g: Building permit issued on October 30, 2000. Engineered plans and general contractor caused delay. No stairs on first design, second design still did not meet building department needs for stairs requiring a letter from engineer for a new design. Note: we had Colorado Engineering out on May, 2001 and they admitted that their design would not work and they gave us a discount on the new design we had prepared and had to have stairs reengineered and revised with the county Planning Department
Item i: Footers formed and inspected on 10-31/ She is in error by 11 days
Item j: Footers poured on 11-15. She is in error by 21 days.
Item k: Walls begun on 11/17. She is in error by 23 days.
Item l: Walls complete on 12-14. She is in error by 4 days
Item n: Home delivered 12/8. She is in error by 20 days
Item p: Well drilled on 11/13. She is in error by 57 days.
Item t: Electric line trench due on 2-13 (no rock. Water line stared on 2/01 and ran into rock. Dynamited water line on 3/07. On 3/22 gas line dug (no rock)
Item u: Only one line blasted partially (water) on 3/07. She is in error by 9 days.
Item w: Roughed in plumbing installed and passed on 3/19. She is in error by 10 days
Item x: Floor poured on 3-24. Ground still frozen. Explain to me how it thawed out in the winter without a heat source. She is in error by 13 days.
Item z: Grade from and north side of home. Initiated by homeowner. She is in error by 7 days.
Item aa: Floor ready for firewall and stairs on 3/31. Recv'd partial bid for one wall and ceiling on 4/16 without fire door. Asked for additional walls to be bid. Never received bid for entire garage and fire door. No mention of when garage doors and openers to be installed. Never received bid for stairs.
Item bb: Contractor hired by us to design stairs 4/24 (not to build them).
Item cc: Barbara was never at site until 4/24
Item dd: Barbara was never at site until 4/24
Item ee: There was no discussion regarding other contractor on this date or any other date.
Item ff: Total fabrication. We never agreed to release Barbara or the permit on this date.
Item gg: Not true. Work continued under her license through 5/7
Item hh: Did not agree to release of permit. We gave Barbara a list of demands that she had to meet before we would release her as the general contractor. Permit was never discussed. We terminated her when it became obvious that she was never going to meet our reasonable demands and was doing absolutely nothing.

Barbara stated that due to cost overruns we decided to handle the exterior rock work, steel roofing and deck construction on our own. First, we always intended to either do the rock siding ourselves or finish off the entire house in cedar siding. This was never part of the contract with NorthStar. Doug told us on February 5 that his people were too busy to build our deck. According to his own people they said that they were not. Doug did the old bait and switch routine. Give a great deal on a deck then pull the offer. It is obvious that we wanted NorthStar to construct the deck as it was in the contract. But from the start they did not intend to do it as they did not apply for building permits or have the deck engineered. Doug also told us that NorthStar could not put on a roof until late spring or early summer. Since we planned on being in our house before then we told them to forget it. We planned on doing it later. Again, this item was in the contract but was not engineered or permitted with the county.

The second time line table in her letters deals with the septic system. This has been a fiasco and should never have taken over eight months to install. Affordable excavating began working on the septic system and hit rock. Per the engineering report for the septic system the engineer should have been notified. Instead Barbara brought in J&M Excavating. He began working on the system in mid November. Barbara states that they excavator stopped on November 30, 2000 due to hard material (rock). This is not true. J&M Excavating continued digging four trenches off and on in the rock. At this time we did not realize that a leach field in rock was a problem, although the general contractor should have. Doug Robbins fired J&M Excavating on February 12, 2001.

As you will notice on line 10 Barbara omitted the date. It was an entire month before another excavator was on site. Barbara had Gunsmoke Excavating move 50 feet away and try digging a new leach field. He was able to dig one trench but hit solid material at both ends of the trench. Gunsmoke Excavating stopped at the time and he along with Anne Hart and Barbara Robbins decided to call in an engineer. It was agreed that the engineer that Gunsmoke Excavating desired from Fairplay would be called in. Gunsmoke Excavating dug two test holes for the engineer. He never moved to another site to dig new trenches as Barbara states.

Imagine our surprise when Barbara shows up with an engineer on March 22, 2001 that we had not agreed upon. We decided to not say anything because we wanted to get this project done. We agreed with the engineer to reperc and to locate the leach field just 100 feet from the well. The engineer felt that other areas were possibly going to have problems with rock. The engineer performed a perc test on March 30 (Barbara indicates that perc test was done on April 10, 200l) and had two good readings and one hold that had a very slow perc rate. He did not know if the holes could be averaged but would check on it. The engineering report was prepared on April 4, 2001 and set in his office until Sherry Beeler asked Doug if she could go and pick up on the report on April 13 (Normally Barbara picks up the reports). This caused a delay of 10 days by Barbara before the report was submitted to Environmental health.

This engineered system report turned in to the Environment Health was turned down because he could not use results from any one hole that was more than 20 minutes apart. Barbara states that the homeowner refused an aerobic system. That is an outright lie. Anne told her it was the lease desired of the three choices she gave to us. If the engineer decided it had to be aerobic we would have went that way. However, we talked to the engineer and he said that the bed system would work for us. We told him to go ahead with designing that system. He designed a new system that required 97 infiltrators. A permit was issued on this system. We became frustrated with Barbara because of the delays she was causing and her attempts to drive us to an aerobic system. She stated that there was $9,000.00 available for the septic system. Again, she stretches the truth. The contract had $5,565 budgeted for a septic system of which $1,525.00 was already spent leaving $4,040.00 to be applied towards a septic system.

The water table in this new area was very high at this time and we began to lose confidence in this engineered system because we felt it would fail within a few years. We hired another engineer and he said that we would have problems with the designed system eventually because of the water table. We had the septic system reengineered and had a permit issued. This system is currently in place and has passed county inspection.

Barbara states in her letter that pouring the slab for the basement floor was an intentional delay. I don't know where she came up with this idea but we were never told this and would never have agreed to that. We were living in a motel and surely would not want to stay any longer than needed (financially this was hurting us). We were always led to believe by Doug Robbins that we wold be in about 4 weeks from whenever we asked him. Trouble is the 4 weeks just kept moving. If we knew the floor wouldn't be poured until spring we would have rented an apartment. What was agreed upon was that after the house was set and the basement was enclosed, heat would be connected to thaw out the ground and pour the floor. A competent contractor could have accomplished pouring the floor no later than the end of January.

She goes on to say that the engineer expressly prohibited the pouring of the floor on frozen ground. Well, it is our opinion that the floor was poured on frozen ground. She shows the floor was poured on April 6 when actually the floor was poured on March 24. In fact, the floor was scheduled to be poured on March 10 but was moved to March 17, then March 24 due to plumber delays and the contractor Barbara hired to do the slab could only do the work on Saturdays.

Barbara knows the stairs, septic, and firewalling the garage were not completed when she wrote her letter. We had not hired a contractor to do any work. We hired a contractor to guide and help us build a deck and design stairs. When Barbara was unable to find a contractor to build stairs per her design we realized we needed to terminate her services and decided to build the stairs ourselves. This project is taking a lot longer now because we are doing the work ourselves since we are financially exhausted.

We never stopped any of NorthStar's contractors from performing work on this project contrary to what Barbara states. We did, however, complain about a couple of items that we felt the subcontractors were not doing correctly.

The bid we received from NorthStar on April 16, 2001 for firewalling the garage was for the wall dividing the garage from the unfinished living area and the ceiling. This bid did not include a fire door. We had requested that the entire garage area be firewalled. We wanted the two blue Styrofoam walls drywalled. We never received a complete bid.

Barbara states that she can't allow unlicensed or uninsured workers on her job site but she used Whitewater Systems who is not licensed in Teller County. As far as doing work we were told to get our own deck person by Doug Robins at NorthStar on February 5. He even recommended a person he knew who wasn't licensed or insured. We said thanks but no thanks. All we were doing is what Doug told us to do. When Barbara was unable to tell us when, how and who was going to do the stairs we had them designed by a contractor at our expense. By then she was no longer doing anything on our job. Since we cannot afford to hire a contractor to do the work directly we are doing the work ourselves.

Barbara also states that she was currently 29.7% under budget. How can you state you are under budget when the following major items have not been completed and yet are included in her savings?

Driveway completion		Septic System		Final grade work
Garage firewall		Garage doors and openers		Stairs (inside)
Decks (12'x31' & 8'x40')		Metal roof		Gutters
Install carpet and wood floor		Site cleanup and trash removal

She also did not include $1,591.00 for basement fill (sand & dirt), $500 for completing cedar siding installation and $1,183.43 for propane gas installation that we paid directly to the vendors. She was afraid to pay these vendors for fear we would not pay her because we want compensation for the bedroom that she decreased in width by four feet. Well our word means everything to us and we always pay our bills unlike NorthStar.

Currently we are $23,300 over the original budget from NorthStar. This is a discrepancy of $53,000 from her letter sent to you. She knows that she is not $30,000 under budget but is using items not completed to make you believe she is. Almost every item in the contract that is completed has overrun her estimates in the contract. We can prove these figures and we estimate that we will spend at least $8,000 more to finish this project. This includes the savings we have accomplished by removing the general contractor, doing trash removal and home cleaning ourselves.

I conclusion, we consider this project a disaster. It was a poorly managed project from the beginning by Barbara Robbins. There was rarely any attempt by her to explain what was happening and what she was doing to get this project completed in a timely manner. NorthStar and Barbara haven't a clue as to who the customer is. The only thing that was a major problem was the septic system. Taking eight months to try having septic system installed is unacceptable and is totally her responsibility as the general contractor. We were able to have a complete system engineered, permitted, installed and approved in six weeks on our own.

Sincerely,

John Hart             Anne Hart