Legal Question in Civil Litigation in Virginia

Re: Home Builder Liability

Two estimates would likely be the better approach.

Re: Home Builder Liability

YES, YES, YES, YES, YES!!!!

Fix it FIRST.

The #1 reason why people filing a lawsuit without a lawyer LOSE is that they do not know how to prove their losses.

If you do not fix the roof first, then an ESTIMATE is nothing more than an OPINION.... A GUESS.

You will NOT be able to provide ANY evidence of the cost of the repairs. The other side will object, the judge will agree, AND YOU WILL BE TOTALLY BLOCKED from offering ANY evidence of the cost of the repairs.

A written estimate is HEARSAY and in admissible unless the expert who came up with the estimate also testifies.

So you will get -- at best -- $1.

To do this right you would need to bring an expert to testify from his expertise what repairing the roof will cost. And there are a lot of tricky requirements to do this, to establish a foundation for the expert's testimony.

EVEN IF you do the work first, you should probably bring the person who did the work in to testify as a witness. The builder could challenge whether the repairs were necessary, or entirely necessary. So you will need an expert to testify that the work was not superfluous, unnecessary, or improvements above and beyond simply fixing what the builder did wrong.