Dear MIMster: We Wanted Two Kitchen Cabinets But We Were Given These

Pls how can we get our money back for the cabinets?

We are building a house in Nigeria while we live abroad. This project is being managed by my brother-in-law who called a carpenter to come fix the kitchen cabinet for us.

The carpenter charged us 305k for both kitchens and he was given an advance payment of 270k to enable him get the materials.

When my BIL sent us the pictures of the work the carpenter did, we were perplexed because he did rubbish. His job was an eye sore.

Note that my brother in-law has been doing so well with everything we’ve asked him to do. This is the only problem that we’ve had so far.

We’ve been calling the carpenter to come and pull down the nonsense he did but he has refused to. He said that he can only amend what he’s done and cannot undo it. Someone who did not get do the job he was given well in the first place, how can he now amend it? Where will he even start from?

We have seen that he can’t even do the job even though we gave him samples of what we wanted.

The question is: how do you think we can get our money back from the carpenter who has refused pulling down his rubbish work? He can no longer be found at his shop. We have thought of using the police but you know our country, they might still tell him to go and fix it which we know he cannot do. In fact, we don’t want his hand work again.

Are there other means to get him to pay the money he’s owing us? If we call him, he won’t answer his phone.