Refinishing basement; contractor issues — advice / contractor switch?

Swains Pond Ave, Melrose MA

Description

Hello, My wife and I got married on Aug 18 and started this whole project last May (signed early May) hoping / planning to have it completed by late July. Our contractor who we selected out of 4 or 5 different teams who came through and gave us estimates at first quickly showed up and tore down our chimney, which was good.. and then his whole family got covid and then he had a work accident and then he provided no justification for why there were 5 months of delays (!)... he finally broke ground less than 2 weeks ago (September 26) and has since installed the large sliding doors and a window, and has done some significant frame work to support the house above the sliding doors. We were quoted 36K and he says we are about 9800 into that $ so far. We have asked for receipts at this point. The vision here is: refinish the basement — keep the oil tank where it is and build a utility closet around it, move the laundry to stack on some wooden supports into the far corner to the left of the sliding doors in a small laundry room, take that old water heater and get a modern one and sink it into the ground in the back left corner of the bathroom kind of hidden, put in a full bathroom with a vent and a tile shower in the corner to the left of the sliding doors basically right in front of the laundry room, take out that giant heating unit and put in a modern one and put it in the utility closet next to the oil tank, put a custom closet underneath the stairs, relocate the electric box at the foot of the stairs to the utility closet, level the floor with chicken wire or rebar + quickrete, and make the downstairs in front of the sliding doors into as much livable space as possible. Get rid of the lally columns and put in a beam to support the house. We are conceptualizing it as a family room that could be used as a bedroom. We would like to install an AC unit as well, this was not part of the original quote as we had been considering a heat pump but that was not cost effective and we could not switch to gas unfortunately as well. Laminate flooring over concrete. We started off at 36K, he asked for 18K up front (now appears to be illegal to ask for more than 1/3 at a time) and it was all going fine 'you'll never have any cost increase only time delays' — until he had some personnel issues and the new plumber quoted him 3K more for plumbing, the new concrete guy quoted him 6K more to use rebar instead of chicken wire — he said 'we couldn't have known we'd need rebar, this floor is only 3 inches thick and has fractures (obviously, look at the pictures) and we only knew we needed to reinforce the concrete when we started using the supporting beams (see pictures) and it started causing the concrete plates to move / tilt'. I literally told him this when he was looking at the floor - our concrete foundation is all kinds of cracked, we will definitely need to level it and reinforce it, and he was saying yeah no problem just some chicken wire and a pour, no problem. Basically after 10 days of work in the basement this guy says to me 'it's going to be 12K more'. "It's not money going to me, it's all materials or plumbing or concrete or rebar". This obviously raised some red flags for us. After 5 months of delays, now a 1/3 price increase has lost our trust.  Any professional opinions on what we should do about this or personal stories of similar situations? Our contract with this guy specifies the dates of when work would be done and we are months and months beyond that. The contract we received has no itemized list of what would be done (although the one we signed on did), so as my wife's father says, 'that could be the cost of screwing in three light bulbs! You need a list of services!' He is saying he needs 6K check asap or else there will be delays, and then the 'rest of the money' by next week or else there will be delays, which also appears to be illegal according to contract law. Could anyone further explain to us are protections under contractor law? We would be interested in quotes for taking over this project and getting it done by mid December, latest. Thank you!