Reasons to Dismiss Ubau’s Complaint against Colin Andrew, Replace with Counter-Claim
Below is a summary chronology of key events in this sad development, from 2004 to 2007.
Several years ago Colin was living at home in D.C. while studying towards his AA degree in Construction Management in Montgomery County. In discussions with friends from High School (Aldo Ubau and Bobby Fadavi) they jointly came up with the ideas of remodeling part of the basement area of the Ubau’s large brick home into an Efficiency apartment that Colin then could live in while going to school. The Ubau’s would become his landlord above Colin’s space.
This discussion was clinched in conversations with all three by Colin’s father Bob Andrew who agreed to work with Colin to remodel it. As attached photos show, the basement was stripped back to brick walls, wood studs and concrete floors. Colin spent over $7,000 at Home Depot plus his father worked with him every Wed. night and Sunday afternoon for most of a year - between them about 500 hours. In addition to the bedroom, closet and bathroom for Colin built at one end of the basement, he and his dad also installed a laundry Washer and Dryer and new water heater in the other end for the common use of the Landlord family and tenant. However, the Ubau’s did not hold up their end of the agreement, by not also installing a kitchen area in the basement, thus forcing Colin to have to eat out – raising his living expenses
In 2006, the Ubau’s discovered their kitchen above was illegally draining to the street storm sewer, and Colin did the plumbing to reroute their internal drains back into the sanitary sewer.
Late 2006, there was a break-in by an African-American women purportedly a friend of a girl Colin knew at University who was retaliating over a disagreement. The Ubau’s grandmother was the only witness, and had to endure what for her was the humiliation of having to testify in DC court that she couldn’t identify the person who broke in – “blacks all looked alike to her”
Summer of 2007 is when the Ubau’s asked Colin to leave, in a manner that indicated racial bias – they made it clear that as Hispanics they did not want Colin to have African American guests. They went so far as to have their own laundry removed: a hostile act in any Landlord-Tenant dispute, to try and get Colin to leave because of increased costs of having to use coin laundry.
Now the Ubau’s are trying to sell the house for $490,000 – an inflated asking price given the remaining code violations in that area of the basement they failed to complete. The Efficiency that Colin and his father built has helped raise the value of home, but they have not offered to share any profits with him, never mind that he has not yet received fair market value use of it while in school: the worth of the materials and labor put in exceeds the going monthly rate for Efficiency in upper NE Washington DC - it would take several more years to break even on value received. We ask the court to appoint a mediator to establish what the Ubau’s owe Colin.