Our Experience Using Rick Duchin as a Contractor

Why should I write a blog about a terrible experience with a contractor? And why should you bother reading it? I've learned how heartbreaking, bank-breaking and just plain miserable it is when you get involved with an unscrupulous builder. I hope that by honestly telling my story, someone will avoid the nightmare we've lived through working with Rick Duchin. 

While this represents just one family's experience, and certainly even the best contractors can have bad relationships, I believe that Rick's belligerence, his defensiveness and his threatening nature make him a dangerous choice for anyone.

 Our experience with Rick began when we received a bid of $165,000 to add a bedroom and redo our landscaping. We live on a hill and this was the cheapest bid we received. However, the bid seemed strange to us. It was full of zeroes with all of the costs lumped into only a handful of categories. When we asked Rick about it, he became angry and defensive. We should have known then to stay away, but we were desperate to begin. Why? Well Rick had told us that the city required we begin by Oct 15. because of the rainy season, which turned out to be a lie.

After putting the bid incident behind us, work got underway. Rick told us our landscape architect had given us terrible drawings and he could not work with them. And even though the bid was "not-to-exceed" he said that working without drawings might bring up lots of extras. It sure did. As the invoices began coming in, there was no way to compare them to the bid. We were quickly burning through cash without much getting done. When asked to account for the expenses, he got extremely angry, yelled at us and said we had to wait for monthly accounting, which of course never came.

One day, while I was at work, Rick came into our home, telling my wife that we were way over budget. When she questioned him about this, holding our brand new baby in her arms, Rick got extremely anger at her, yelling that she was "a liar" and bringing her to tears. My wife demanded he leave.

At that point, we wanted out but Rick threatened to bill us for the remainder of the profit and overhead (about $20k) if we fired him. He threatened to put a lien on our house. He threatened to charge us $300 an hour for time spent on the phone with us. We decided to bring our architect in as a mediator but even that ultimately failed.

After month two Rick had failed to show up to the job site for almost a week. Requests for accounting met with more abuse and on the verge of desperation, we made the decision to fire him. That night it rained and our house was water damaged because he had failed to put tarps over the places he had opened our walls. 

We had spent $85k and the job was only a quarter of the way done. We immediately began the process of having his work inspected and found that he had not followed the architects plans. We were also told by every contractor that came to bid on our job that he overcharged us about $20-$30,000.  Rick refused to show us evidence of where this money went and has ignored all the letters from our lawyer asking him to do so.  

Because we have withheld payment of Rick's unsubstantiated final invoices until a full inspection of the damage he caused our house can be assessed, Rick has threatened to put a lien on our house for the full amount of the contractor. Not only is this not allowed under California law, making such a threat is itself illegal.

This is but a tiny slice of the damage and abuse we've suffered at the hands of Rick Duchin and RJD Construction. Since firing Rick, we have found a number or great, friendly and honest contractors with whom to work. There is absolutely no reason to take a chance with this kind of abusive, unscrupulous building outfit. I'd even be happy to recommend some good ones for you. Just please, for your family's sake, avoid Rick Duchin and RJD Construction. If you have questions, you can email me at: jonahsachs [at] yahoo.com