oh snap!

=O

She probably reaches more people than my old neighbor who scrawled her grievances on her garage door. In black paint. For the whole neighborhood to see. Actually, maybe she did reach a lot of people. As the neighbors complained to their friends, the friends drove by to see. and they told two friends. and they told two friends. and so on. There sure was a lot of traffic on the street -- until the neighbor across the street from it called the police. Garage door was cleaned up. Lawsuits and countersuits ensued.

Whew.

Hopefully the rest of their complaints are more legitimate than the wood floor issue. The stain on the floor is a legitimate issue but they're mistaken if they think select White Oak eliminates color variations. The short pieces look to be typical for select grade.

Hi Janie, Thanks so much for sharing about @thehousethatjackbroke. I am the homeowner, as is my wife. This has been the absolute worst experience of both our lives. Four years after buying this house we have yet to have a moments peace or joy in it. Recently, our construction forensics experts have found: four floor truses that were installed upside down, support beams not properly sistered together which are now sagging, exterior cracks where the new construction meets old on the upper new floor which most likely indicates problematic shifting, wood floors which are now cupping all over the house due to not installing quarter dawn rift cut wood over an in floor radiant system. The horrors just keeps keeping on. This all could have been prevented if we were never introduced to a completely unqualified contractor, Jim Vogel “The Company” from Jeff Jordan from @Jeff Jordan Architects LLC Jeff Jordan was also hired as our Construction Adminstrator, in addition to his architect duties for a separate fee on a separate contract. ALL of this happened under his “supervision” without him ever calling out any of these obvious defects to either my wife or me, I wonder why? Hmmmmm. They have both recently been served in NJ State Superior Court, we look forward to our day and we look forward to being instrumental in having both their licenses revoked and yes, we are very serious. Being made financially whole is not enough at this point. I’ll be damned if either of these people subject their negligence and malpractice on another poor unsuspecting individual. Again, thanks so much for sharing!

I read your instagram account and the experience you have both been through is surreal and shocking. Just out of curiosity, are you also suing the town inspectors that signed off on this work? How do up-side down trusses pass a framing inspection? Are trade inspections not required?

...

Damn. We live in Hoboken I see some (but not a lot) of those signs for your architect around town. I also have a couple of ppl on my blacklist, not from my own experience, but from others. I’m really sorry you are going through this; it sounds like an expensive nightmare.

@devonfield, sadly one can not sue the city of Jersey City. It has been explained by our lawyer and other industry professionals that municipalities are immune to these types of suits. The thinking being, if a city were to be sued for every home renovation gone bad, the city would never have time to do the “people’s business”. Kinda like how a sitting president can not be sued while in office, no matter how serious the transgressions might be. Fair, right? All of the inspectors were asleep at the wheel as we have so many numerous defects that they cross numerous types of inspections. The whole build was/is a colossal fail thanks to @Jeff Jordan Architects LLC

So sorry about your experience. I have a friend with a nightmare story right now. wish There were more I could do to help

@Johnson Flooring Co Inc yes the rest of our complaints are also legitimate including inverted trusses and screws such as this photo. Check out our latest posts and you will see we are dealing with more than a failed wood floor installation

following

Following.

" yes the rest of our complaints are also legitimate including inverted trusses and screws such as this photo "

I'm only qualified to comment on wood floor issues.

@Johnson Flooring Co, we had an expert from the NWFA fail the floors outright on the installation. The expert also said the floors “barely, just barely” passed for qualifying for “select” grade. He could only fail for one item in our report and chose to fail the installation due to a horrendous nail schedule but said he would have seriously considered failing the floors on the grade of wood too But just made more sense to fail on the installation as it was done so badly.

@Rob Fielack I’m so sorry you went through this headache and I honestly think it is way more common than people suspect. Thank you for documenting it and not letting this chump get away with doing this to more people with impunity. Court was the right move. But it’s still awful to see so much money down the drain for a poor job, even as it is being remediated.

@dsnine thank you so much for your kind words, we’ve heard from so many people who have either suffered a similar fate or are strangers who just want to wish us well. The best thing anyone can do for us is to follow the Instagram page @thehousethatjackbroke and comment. Both the contractor and architect‘s insurance provided lawyers played a delay game for the last 18 months and the only thing that got them to stop stalling was the Instagram page. Please share and comment! Thank you again!

bpath - sounds like someone I know who conveyed her message in black paint on the house and garage door because she was unhappy with contractor. She ended up trying to set the house on fire to collect on the insurance. The house is now for sale. Haven't heard what happened to her. She doesn't live there, of course.

Rob this is insane. If you really want to stick him and don't mind shelling out a bit of money: you could buy a Google Ad for "Jeff Johnson Architect" and then your instagram site would be the first thing that pops up when you google him. Good luck! So sorry to hear about this.

Thanks Akila, I may just do that! I was actually thinking of doing a website with a very similar url. I like the way you think! ;)

What a horrific story. I cannot even begin to imagine what you have been through and the fact that the inspectors approved it is even more is very disconcerting. Hope you get your day in court soon and get what you rightly deserve.

Thank you @NewEnglandgal, our day in court will be a ways off as we have to now rip out our whole first floor ceiling, tear out plumbing, radiant heat, electrical, lighting, gas piping and data wires in or to tear out the upside down trusses and failing beams and then reinstall. This will take months more and during the process we will have to jack up the second floor to make room to install the beams and the trusses. This will most likely make our floors uneven upstairs, crack walls, jamb windows and crack tiles in the bathrooms. So we need to know exactly what these latest damages will cost us. We are already $200k in fixes BEFORE even doing this. An abject nightmare. Please follow us on @thehousethatjackbroke and please comment and share, it really does help us plus other people should be warned as to the quality of construction administration services @Jeff Jordan Architects LLC provides his clients.

Are you waiting to fix everything before suing? I’d sue sooner. not a lawyer but that’s my instinct. Sounds like you’ll never get done with fixes and the more time you give them the more damage they can do. Do you have a lawyer? i can’t imagine you need to have done the repairs before suing.

so sorry for all you have gone through.

Once we moved in, the house quickly became unlivable. We had a radiant heat system that was malfunctioning in mid February. Then it was leaking showers to the floor below, and many other defects too numerous to mention here. We got a lawyer three months after moving in (April 2018) and served both parties notice. They then did a concerted effort to ignore us. During this time we had more rolling defects, one after the other after the other. We couldn’t get the lawsuit locked down because just when we thought nothing else could be defective in the house, major stuff started failing, like floor sagging and trusses and support beams failing. In a way, their attempts at stalling and hoping we would just go away has bit them in the ass. Had we sued too early we never would have had the major issues like the trusses and beams known to us. So, we filed suit officially in NJ Superior court three weeks ago and look forward to our day in court. Just a side note, our architect and construction administrator, Jeff Jordan @Jeff Jordan Architects LLC never, not once, said he was sorry, took ownership of his failings...nothing. The best he could do after we went to his office to detail all our defects was to say, “But I thought we were friends” and then to reach out to his insurance company to lawyer up. Again, never ONCE took any responsibility or ownership. That is the kind of man Jeff Jordan @Jeff Jordan Architects LLC is.

Good luck in court! may justice prevail

Rob, what an absolute nightmare.. So the architect still has a 5 star Google rating? Unbelievable. I wonder if that's what happened with our builder, who also doesn't have any negative reviews, which is mind boggling. His failure to supervise our new build adequately resulted in some very bad framing issues that were caught by us before anything got covered up. It took three months for those problems to be fixed. We were lucky...and at least our builder apologized. I guess your architect didn't because an apology is an admission of guilt.

@Kathy Funny you should notice that, kinda strange, right? Not really, because one can maintain a perfect five star Google review rating when you remove LEGITIMATE negative reviews. @Jeff Jordan Architects LLC had my wife’s and my reviews taken off his Google page. Again, this is the type of person we are talking about. Do you think it is ethical or fair to remove LEGITIMATE negative reviews? Apparently @Jeff Jordan Architects LLC thinks it’s just fine. No wonder we have a defective disaster of a house when this is what he would do over a couple of true negative reviews, imagine if he had to admit to some of the defects he surely had to know about. And if he didn’t notice any of the multitude of defects, then he is just plain negligent then. Which is it @Jeff Jordan Architects LLC, are you dishonest, incompetent or negligent? Remember, picking more than one is perfectly fine!