Legal Question in Construction Law in Illinois

I am the home owner in Illinois acting as the general contractor on the remodel of my home. There is a 12' x 24' new room addition being added to my existing house that is have the second floor removed and a new second floor being rebuilt. There is also a 15' x 28' attached garage being added to the house. This is a very large project to the scale of about 250K. I have chosen each contractor and hired each one myself instead of hiring a general contractor.

The concrete contractor was hired to pour and install all of the new footings that are 10" thick x 20" wide in the ground below the frost line. This was done.

The masonry contractor was hired to build the cinder block foundation walls which he did.

Now it is time for the builder to start building on the new foundation and as he did he found out that the house was 6" out of square and unable to build on the foundation. The builder notified me and should me the problem. I than contacted both the concrete contractor and the the masonry contractor about the problem and they came to the job site and yelled and screamed that it was not there fault, after three hours or this the the concrete contractor never squared up his work he just poured the new concrete using his eye and the existing grade never using a level or tape measure. Being the footings are 20" wide and the block is only 8" wide I asked the masonry contractor why he didn't catch this and adjust his block to make it square, he told me he never checked square or checked with a tape measure to see if it was all straight and right. So I told them that they are both at fault and it all needs to be redone. They agreed and tore down there work and did it all over again on the house foundation at there expense. It did off set the back of the house by 3" which is not what the blueprints show for.

Now the builder is starting to build the garage and come to find out it is out of square by 3". So I contacted the concrete contractor and the masonry contractor again to discus this and the same story neither one of them checked for square or used a tape measure. This time the entire garage foundation needs to get ripped out and redone to make it right and to make it work. This time the excavator is all done and back filled everything. The cost for the excavator to dig it all out is $2000.00 and the the masonry contractor and the concrete contractor needs to redo all of there work again.

Neither one wants to take responsiblty for this big mistake. They did offer to fix the job on there dime again but they want to do the excavation themselves. I don't want them to do the excation for several reasons: 1) they are not excavators 2) I've all ready seen the quality of there work 3) I want my orginal excavator to do the work because he did an awesome job and his work was done perfectly right the first time. I'm afraid of these guys doing a hack job and not caring since they are both all ready losing money.

My wife does not even want them to correct there mistake and just hire someone else all together to finish there work. The good thing is no one has been paid yet for any of the work. I do have a construction loan thru a bank and I have not put there draw in yet.

Do I have to let them finish and do I have to pay them for any of the work that is done? How about the foundation that is under the new addition that had to be corrected. It is not even correct right we came to an agreement on how to make it work.

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