ᐅ The subcontractor installed the tiles very poorly.

Hello,

due to the large number of construction projects, the tile setter hired by the developer contracted a subcontractor from Italy. The workmanship is poor, meaning corners and edges were chipped, silicone smears everywhere, and so on. The highlight was the consistently incorrect calculation of tiles in some of the houses—that is, instead of deducting 10–15% for waste, they charged for 20–35% too many tiles. A nice extra income—I don’t want to imply it’s intentional, but with around 200–300 houses per year, that adds up to a substantial amount. The difference for the excess tiles was credited back to us, but now we have another problem. A commissioned border tile looks awful—unsuitable silicone that cannot be removed, chipped corners (which looks especially bad on a black border).

The site manager does not respond, and emails to the management lead nowhere. Even employees of the parent company were shocked by the poor quality of work.

Such a border costs €700–800, which may be a small amount on the construction site, but for us it is unacceptable, as some sections are extremely unsightly.

How would you proceed in such a case? Customer-oriented work is, by the way, barely considered by this company, so an appeal to reason is probably pointless.

Hello,

I am not allowed to provide legal advice, as this is reserved exclusively for licensed professionals here in Germany. However, I can share how I would handle this based on my daily experience.

Haeuslebauer12 schrieb:

How would you proceed in such a case? By the way, customer-oriented service is seriously lacking at this company, so appealing to reason is hardly an option.

Under no circumstances should you pay the tile contractor; you can withhold up to three times the value of the defects—at least under a contract governed by the German Construction Contract Procedures (BGB).

Issue a defect notification with a two-week deadline (since there is no immediate risk). If there is no response, send another defect notification with a one-week deadline. If this period also passes without results, hire an external tiling company to fix the defects and charge the costs to your general contractor.

That will definitely get things moving :-)

Best regards, Bauexperte

This model would have worked perfectly well for all trades. However, after the bathrooms and so on were planned, everything was completed to a certain extent, and the first tiles were laid in the house, the invoice arrived—payment in advance, as has been standard practice with this company for the past two years. Following the "take it or leave it" approach, and since the homeowners were satisfied during the first construction phase (about 1.5 months lead time), we unfortunately paid. At that point, no one had mentioned that a subcontractor was responsible for our houses. Yes, we were trusting and basically got burned. That’s the crux of the whole story. If only we had known. We never paid in advance for any other trade; here, at that time, we had no other choice because redesigns with a company not affiliated with the general contractor were no longer possible.

Could you please also correct the typo in the thread title? I only noticed it today.