When my wife and I decided to build our home we hired Victor Lopez to assist us in the blueprint process as well as permitting. He was supposed to be an architect according to a subcontractor we knew. We choose to deal with him since he lived in our home town, this would facilitate any communication throughout the project.
Victor Lopez has a partnership with a man by the name of Marco. Our initial meeting took place in a restaurant in town. The three of us discussed mildly what I wanted to do. They assured me that they were the right people for the job. Along with our home I was also building two residences in the city of Chicago, to keep our cost down we bargained a deal for the blue prints for all three project.
I was very direct with both of them when I explained that I was looking for a price that would take me all the way to receiving permits. We set the price for the work to be completed $2750 for the smaller homes and $8000 for ours.in order to make our projects priority they were paid in full after the preliminaries were approved. The drawings for the smaller homes were completed but they took over three months to complete. This was in March. Today February I received permits for one home and this took over a year. The second home is still pending zonning aproval due to discrepencies that should have been foreseen by the Victor and Marco. Our home has not received permits yet.
These two clowns were not licensed, the are mere draftsmen.in order to complete the drawings the needed to have a licensed architect sign the drawings. The architect who was signing the drawings steered away due to their work ethics. I was made aware of this when the drawings for our home was not getting completed. I got every sob story this guy used his family, work, etc. To buy him time. I often would tell him that if he was not able to complete this job I would find some one else and he would assure me that everything was fine. Until one day he stopped answering the phone.
Having paid so much money and having so much trouble with two of the projects I was very desperate. Finally I decided to call from a friends phone, you guess it he answered right away. I asked "what the f*#$% is going on?" he said "I was going to call you today". Yeah right, that was the last time I heard from him. I went looking for him at his residence were we met several time and left messages with his family members repeatedly. Oh, I also spoke to his mom and brother and told them that he owed me my money for the work he did not complete. They were curious as to why I was looking for him so much. I explained to his brother that I would leave one last message to call me back or send me a check for $4000, half the amount since legal expenses and time would eventually eat up he other half, or I would find the means to get my money from every body who assisted him in his transactions with me.including his mom and dad since it was their house we would meet and I would drop off information.
These guys not only took our hard earned money, they took our dream of designing our home to raise our family. Their incompetence has caused much disappointment in our family. I might have been naive or what have you but what they did was plain wrong. My new year's resolution is to find a way to go after them so they can never do this again.
0 comments