Innovative Designs - a warning for home renovators

We contracted a builder, Marissa West, MD of Innovative Designs, from the 12th March for home renovations. Five months later, the building project at our property is currently incomplete and work has ground to a halt after numerous delays, insufficient materials being delivered to site, no site manager and all workers walking off site, both on the 14th May and the 25th July, due to not being paid for work done.

In addition, previous builders, electricians and suppliers employed and/or subcontracted by Innovative Designs have arrived at our property, after hours, to complain about negligence, mismanagement, and unpaid wages and invoices. Having these disgruntled strangers on our property is putting our young family’s safety at risk.

All schedules in regards to the anticipated project completion date provided by Innovative Designs were not been met due to the mismanagement of the project, empty promises and ongoing delays and excuses.

Finally on the 17th August, Marissa West appears to have walked off site as we are not able to contact her, despite calls, emails and sms'es to her to ask for an update. She currently owes us R134, 000. We are also opening a case of theft against her as she collected tiles on our behalf for which we had paid the supplier directly and she has not returned them to us, despite numerous requests to do so.

We are exploring all avenues (legal and civil) open to us to recoup what we have lost and we would like to put this warning out there so that this does not happen to any one else.