Legal Question in Business Law in California

Re: Insurance company

Disclaimer: The materials provided below are informational and should not be relied upon as legal advice.

The contractor should have given you a written estimate for items that were included in the work. Any "extra work" probably had to be approved by you before they were performed. Also, you can ask for a detailed explanation of what these "extra work" were comprised of. You should consult your own attorney to protect your legal rights.

Re: Insurance company

This sounds like a contract-interpretation problem to me.

"Extra work" is work that the contract does not specify. Often, it is hard to determine whether work is equired under the basic contract or whether it is indeed "extra."

Some contracts require written "change orders" for extra work, either by their own terms, or by law. Changes to home-improvement contracts must be in writing - and your contract probably falls under the definition of "home improvement," which includes repair work.

However, a contractor that performs work where a written contract or modification was required, but didn't get one, may still be able to recover the fair value of the work done under a "quantum meruit" or quasi-contract theory of recovery.

I suggest visiting a law library and skimming through the two-volume set called "California Construction Contracts and Disputes" (CEB, publisher), looking at index topics for Extra Work and Home Improvement Contracts and Estimates. You'll get a better feel for the subject than I could possibly communicate in a LawGuru response. You'll also see that this is a much-litigated issue, and maybe also get the sense that judges tend to decide these cases on the basis of whatever seems fair, in the circumstances, to the judge, there being no hard-and-fast laws or rules requiring a particular outcome.