A couple battling illness wanted their historic family home to look its best, but they say a contractor took all the money they had and never finished repairs.
Bill Harris is the fifth generation owner of his family home. He hopes to leave the property to his daughter.
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“Neither one of us know how long we have left. [My wife has] stage four metastatic breast cancer. I've got ALS. I want it to look like it's supposed to look before we go,” Harris told 5 On Your Side.
In July 2023, his regular contractor was busy, so Harris admits he got impatient and hired someone else.
Dustin Fuller quoted $7,700 to prep and paint the outside of the house, build a deck and do some work in the kitchen.
“I hired this guy, and all his references checked,” Harris said.
But the project didn’t pan out.
“It was just a constant litany of excuses as to why he couldn't be here,” Harris recalled.
Harris paid Fuller installments totaling $8,600. However, painting barely started, Harris said the kitchen was never touched, and the deck Fuller subcontracted to someone else had nails sticking out and was poorly built.
“We're out roughly $10,000 all the way around,” Harris told 5 On Your Side. “$8,600 for what we paid him, and then the $1,700 we had to rebuild the deck.”
5 On Your Side called Fuller, who said he'd rescrape the house and paint it all and would take care of the deck situation but wouldn't explain what that meant.
That was in late July. As of today, nothing has been done.
“We've just been back and forth with him for two years. ‘When are you going to come and finish this? When are you going to come and finish this?’ Nothing's gotten resolved,” Harris said.
Harris says at this point, he's out of options. “I mean, we're on disability. It's not like we can go to the well and say, ‘Oh, well, we've got another $8,600 we can throw at the house.’ It’s not there.”
“I just hate to see him hurt so bad,” Aileen Harris said about her husband. “Because I know what this house means to him."
A criminal case against Fuller was dismissed when attorneys determined this was a civil case.
Harris says he won't pursue the civil route, mainly because of his health.
As for Fuller's side of things, he blamed some of the work delays on the initial criminal case, which was open for nine months and closed in December 2024.
The work remains unfinished.