Estimates or bills for small claims court?
Location: Colorado
Our neighbor recently had his 12-year-old apply water-based fence stain to our shared fence, unsupervised. As you may guess, the child overloaded the roller on a windy day, and it splattered all over our long, 1.5-year-old sidewalk and all over the side of our house. It baked in over the course of weeks, unbeknownst to us as we were out of town.
He claimed he is a “concrete expert” and said he could clean it off. He then attempted to clean the spots off by taking a wire brush attached to his drill, and scraped off the top layer of our cement, making it look even worse than before, and it is now splotchy all over and has lost texture.
We have done our due diligence to explore all solutions with actual concrete contractors, but it will be very expensive to get it anywhere close to its original state. We plan to present the estimates to our neighbor, but we are preparing for an uncooperative response.
If you go to small claims court, do you have to bring actual bills that have already been paid? Or is it sufficient to bring multiple quotes/estimates showing the amount you’re requesting is only the lowest cost to actually replace the damage? (We have sufficient photographic evidence of all the damage and plan to get at least 4 quotes, including from the original concrete installer we used). We paid thousands out of pocket to get it installed in the first place, and we really don’t want to have to front those costs again if we don’t have to.
Any advice or words of wisdom are greatly appreciated. We are truly hoping this can be resolved amicably, but we want to be prepared as the husband had the audacity to be annoyed that we were unhappy with his botched clean up job. (And side note: we are offering to have our house painted, so he doesn’t even have to incur that cost.)