Paint Dispute: 8 May 2023
Update on my paint dispute:
Meanwhile, as my structure continues to degrade:
Surprisingly, or not, I have made no progress on my paint dispute with the contractor. This is not what I expected as the laboratory test results, internal emails, and quality/tender agreements clearly show that the consented specifiedsystem was known and agreed, not applied correctly and partially substituted.
Following communications, I suspect that they have not read the formal letter with evidence that I sent to them (even though they acknowledged the letter and agreed to remediate within the contract, which is fantastic).
Naively, my approach for this defect was to include it within the 12 month defect set that we are still working through. This is clearly not the right approach for a couple of reasons:
The defect is significant as it affects an entire steel structure due to incorrect preparation (no zincanode 402), and (2), the full extent of the error that I discovered was not disclosed with damaging remediation.
Now I need to tweak my approach a little bit
The build was done with the NZS3910 contract, and I have an Engineer to the Contract. As a contract is an enforceable agreement, the Engineer is going to issue a Contract Instruction specifically for this unresolved defect.
Due to the incorrect change in specification and attempted remediation – I have gone back to my designers requesting that they specify corrective action.
This specified corrective action will form the remediation process that will be issued in the Contract Instruction. Hopefully, the clear steps will lead to an undisputed remediation and the eyesore being corrected, along with thelong-term integrity of the structure being restored with a timeframe on it (so far they are using excuses to avoid my dates).
If the contractor does not agree with the remediation, they will have the ability to respond.
Life would have been so much easier if the team had firstly not changed the system (without asking) and if they had disclosed their full error at the time of me discovering the colour was wrong, we could have remediated correctly.
Why must a single decision to not follow a specification lead to a costly and consuming defect?
