Hi there,
As I told you in the previous post, it was already clear that the incompetent Paulo Correia was not going to enter my house again.
The following Monday he was half an hour late, as was his custom, and I didn’t open the door for him. He waited 15 minutes and left. He didn’t even call or text to see where we were. In the afternoon, he arrived an hour and a half late, so I didn’t open the door either. We saw that the wife was also there who began to send messages to Diego and me, saying that they were going to stay in front of the house until we paid them the money that we supposedly owed them. In addition, she wrote several times that “the police were on their way.”
I could not believe it. First, to come with the wife and prove once again how useless he was. With more than 50 years, this gentleman needs his wife who is most than 20 years younger than him, to solve his problems. Second, having that thug mobster attitude when they weren’t even right. A situation that never happened to me, not even in Latin America.
We waited for the police to come to give him the tools with their supervision, but the police never came; so, it was a lie. So, I decided to call the police and they sent us a patrol that arrived in 5 minutes.
Paulo and his wife were poker-faced when they saw that it was us who had really called the police. I saw through the window how they took the ID from Paulo and his wife. Then they knocked on my door and I opened it for the policeman to come in.
The policeman was very kind and told me that although they did not have jurisdiction in the matter because it was a “civil” problem, they were there to help mediate. He asked me if I wanted to return the tools to Paulo and I said yes. The policeman told me to move away so he could open the gate for him to get the tools. Paulo immediately began to ask for the tiles that were in the house and that he considered to be his.
The policeman asked me again if I wanted to give him the tiles and I said no because I had paid for them. He told me that there was no problem and that I was in charge there.
I asked him what should I do if Paulo came back to my house to try to intimidate me and he told me to call the police again because there they would start a criminal process against Paulo.
The policeman said goodbye and I heard through the gate how he told Paulo not to come back to my house because it would be very bad for him.
From there, I reported Paulo before all the consumer protection organizations, before the police for fraud and before finanças because he never gave me invoices and because he surely did not pay taxes for all that money that he received fraudulently.
After having lost money and a month of time, a man called Vítor Silva who had been recommended to me by the insurance broker came to the house.
The budget for fixing Paulo’s disasters was 135 euros. He had to remove all the silicone that was badly placed with dirt and place it correctly. In addition, he had to fix the bad installation of the shower screen.
I also asked him for an estimate for the bathroom and the painting of the room downstairs and he said he would charge me 915 euros.
It took 3 weeks to come and fix the main bathroom. Supposedly he fixed the silicone issue and told me that he would have some stainless-steel plates made for the shower and would come back to place them when they were ready. It took 2 more weeks to come, and it was 55 more euros.
He came on a Saturday night and since I was varnishing the floor, the following Tuesday I went to check the shower and to clean so I could use the full bathroom.
It turns out that the silicone was placed just as badly with dirt and water was even coming out of a corner of the shower. I immediately wrote to Vitor Silva and sent him all the photos and he told me “I will go when I can”.
Also, after transferring the 190 euros to him, I asked for the invoice and he never sent it or answered me, so I assumed that he was also working illegally.
It’s incredible that the guy was paid to remove the silicone that the other guy put in wrong and he put it in just as badly.
As you can imagine, Vítor was logically ruled out to do the rest of the things that were pending in the house and since he was ignoring me and did not reply to my messages from then on, I also had to report him to all the competent authorities.
The last week that I had Paulo working in the house, I couldn’t take it anymore from anxiety and stress. When I saw how the silicone had turned out after paying 190 euros, I felt devastated.
Imagine after more than 2 months not having a finished bathroom and to top it off, all the illegal things that we kept discovering in the house.
When I talked to people, they all told me that it was like that in Portugal, that they charge what they want and that they leave everything wrong.
These people work in a construction company legally and then work on their own without giving invoices and making disasters. Since there is a lot of demand right now, they don’t mind losing customers because there are always people who need to do renovations around the house.
After a desperate couple of weeks, I tried to take things easy and assumed that I was not going to have the house 100% ready in the time I wanted.
I started making appointments again with companies so that they would give me estimates of what was left to do.
They came from Leroy Merlin, Urban Obras, Casa.7 and Atitude Benévola. In addition, there were 2 independent workers that I found on a Facebook group.
From Atitude Benévola came a Brazilian who seemed competent but when he sent me the budget, he forgot half of the things.
I loved the architect who came from UrbanObras, but then they forgot to send me the budget. To top it off, they sent me the survey when they hadn’t even sent the budget. I left them a negative review and that’s when they sent me the budget that was all together and messy. I had requested separate budgets and with what they had sent, nothing was understood.
A Brazilian came from Casa.7 and I loved her because she was also a designer. When she gave me the budget, I was horrified because she wanted to charge 3 times more than the others; 2850 euros to paint a room and tile two walls. This only for labor because I had the materials. In addition, it would take 15 days when it was something that only took 4 days.
In a group of Latinos in Porto, the company Porto Pladur was recommended to me. I contacted him and he came to make the budget. He was Argentine and that already gave me a good vibe. When he came to visit the house, we had already decided that we were going to paint the room by ourselves. He gave me a budget of 416 euros to paint the area of the stairs and to place the tiles. We decided to give him the opportunity.
Nico from Porto Pladur took 3 and a half days to do all the work. We couldn’t believe that the guy worked 8 hours a day after having Paulo Correia work 3 hours a day for a month.
The finishes were not perfect, and I had to touch up things, but it is something acceptable for the price we had paid.
We were happy with the job and hired him for the rest of the things we wanted to do around the house.
For that part, it was a relief to have found someone competent after 3 months.
After the experience with Paulo Correia and Vítor Silva, you cannot imagine how traumatized I was. After a month listening to everything that was wrong and of poor quality in my house, this man managed to terrify me. Every little thing that happened, for me it was a tragedy and I thought that the house was going to fall apart.
If I found that a few drops of water were coming out of the shower, I would get hysterical because I thought that there were going to be leaks and that all the plasterboard was going to rot. Also, I was left with the thought that my house was shit, and that some tragedy was going to happen in the future.
Also, my obsessive-compulsive disorder skyrocketed. If I was a perfectionist before, what I am after this experience has no name. Now my eyes seem to have increased vision and every place I go, I do a visual scan of how it is painted, the silicone, the tile joints, and the finishes in general.
I also learned the hard way that no one is going to do things better than me. For example, I had decided that I was going to pay to have the outside painted, but then I changed my mind because I wanted to save myself the headache. If I painted, I was going to save money, it was going to look better, and I was not going to have displeasure and waste of time in claiming.
One good thing that came out of all this traumatic experience is that we gained learning and skills to do things around the house that even Nico from Porto Pladur told me we could work doing renovations. We learned about paint, varnish, wooden floors, joints, how to treat and paint metal, the different types of waterproofing paints, and even Diego plans to take a course to learn how to lay tiles.
If up to here you think we had bad luck, in the next posts I will tell you how we discovered that we were scammed in the sale of the house.
Total expenses until March 2023:
- First trip to Porto to visit the houses: 625 euros
- Second trip to Porto to open a bank account: 690 euros
- Price of the house: 185000 euros
- Taxes + notary: 5961.94 euros
- Furniture and materials: 10491.7 euros
- First bathroom renovation: 2630.84 euros
- Cost of fixing what was poorly done in the first work: 190 euros
- Bathroom tiles downstairs + paint: 440 euros
- Paint and refine interior doors: 210 euros
- Sand, fix and varnish the wooden floor: 200 euros (approximate)
- Exterior roofs: 1225 euros
- Paint the house on the outside: 295 euros of labor for the part that Nico painted + 357 euros of paint
- Folding door for bathroom: 85 euros
- Paint gate: 100 euros (approximate)
- Paint the exterior floor with waterproofing paint: 92 euros
Expenses until March 2023: 208.593,48 euros
To give you an idea, the budget to paint the house on the outside that Leroy Merlin gave me was 7,000 euros just for painting and 10,000 euros if the finishes were improved. Doing it ourselves, we spent less than 700 euros.
Left for the following year:
Put blinds or shutters on the outside of the windows facing the street.
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