Ant's Home Improvement

Review: [redacted], the owner and basically the only real employee of Ant's Home Improvement, based out of Perth Amboy, NJ, agreed to do repairs and reconstruction on our Hurricane Sandy damaged home. He still, to date, has not complete the repairs as promised. Some repairs that were completed earlier on were not done without incident such as laying the wrong tile in the kitchen, installing the banister spindles upside down and hanging the kitchen cabinets too low and refusing to re hang correctly unless we paid him for an extra full days work. He began work in May 2013 and said the entire job would only take a couple of months. He started showing up less and less and by the end of August he didn't come back at all. He finally showed up in May 2014 to demolish and reconstruct an exterior room (previous repairs still haven't been completed). He worked a half day, tore down an exterior wall, gutted the room and removed windows and left. He TEXTED my husband two days later stating he wasn't coming back and no longer wanted to work on our home. He left our home exposed! We found out from our town that he did this day's work WITH NO PERMIT. He owes us $8000 since he didn't finish. He has been making empty promises as to when we will see our money, lie after lie about why he hasn't returned our money. It's taken awhile but we have received some of it, but not all. I have also been informed that when he was notified that he was about to be fined $10,000 for working without a permit he quickly went and spent the required hundreds needed to pay for the permits. This money came from the deposit we gave him. He also stated that there is asbestos in the exterior room and that we knew about it. We didn't know about it but I would think as a contractor HE would have noticed it before he did as much demolition as he did. We since had it inspected by the state and the inspector laughed and said that a person could eat ALL of the asbestos on that wall an still not get sick. Enough lies and excusesDesired Settlement: I want the money that he owes us, OUR MONEY, paid in full. NOW.We can not hire another contractor or receive the balance of our payout from the bank for repairs until he returns our money in full. He has no right to keep that money. Obviously he has spent it and doesn't have it. That is WRONG. He promised us that the money we gave him would stay in his business account and wouldn't be touched until he returned to work on our home. BEWARE.