By Kathryn Skelton,Staff Writer
After four contractors backed out, a Hartford couple took matters into their own hands.

HARTFORD – Debra Milazzo-Shannon and her husband, Rick, moved into their unfinished house last month, christening a pool table with friends in a rare moment of levity since they took over construction in May.

There are no doors inside, including on the bathrooms, and Pete the parakeet likes to perch on exposed wires and taunt the dogs. But those, at this point, are minor details.

Their new log cabin went all last winter without a roof.

Anything’s a huge improvement.

After spending $172,000 to buy materials and hire a builder for their dream home, the Shannons had three contractors leave the job in quick succession last fall. What remained was a partial shell, an exposed second floor and lots of anger; they called on Maine’s legislators to license builders to encourage accountability.

That didn’t work. Nor did waiting months for a fourth contractor to finish the job. He quit , too.

“When the guy bailed on us, Rick and I basically came here and cried,” Milazzo-Shannon said. “We basically took back our house. It was almost an epiphany: Nobody is going to do this, so we’re going to have to.”

Since May, the former Minot couple has spent every day after work and every weekend picking away at projects, hiring friends of friends when they needed extra help. They spent another $40,000, mostly money that had been set aside for furniture and fun details that can wait.

She sanded the upstairs floor 15 times trying to remove the damage of a season’s worth of snow – including pale spots where her tub waited months to be installed and drips of chain saw oil – and finally gave up.

“We just decided it was going to be rustic, and that’s the way life is,” said Milazzo-Shannon.

She had days she wanted to quit. Rick didn’t. When either got frustrated, they’d say the same thing: “We are never doing this again.”

The reply, every time: “Hey, you don’t have to tell me.”

Ultimately, the home has turned out just as they’d wanted. There’s an open kitchen and living room downstairs, a loft with 10 enormous logs holding up the roof upstairs.

“I love this house,” said son Shawn, 17, who’s made a dorm-type space out of the loft. When he goes off to college, it’ll become a pingpong area.

In March, Milazzo-Shannon started a Web site to document her building trials and encourage people to share the names of reliable tradespeople, and said she still gets 100 hits a day. Five or six other Maine families have contacted her with similarly bad log home building experiences, including a minister. “Now if that builder isn’t going to hell, I don’t know who would be,” she quipped.

She’ll keep the site going one more year, buoyed by online comments like, “Reading your construction diary gives me incredible insight!”

The couple tried to pursue one set of contractors in small claims court, brothers who left abruptly after a week. The contractors missed the court date, but a judge tossed the case after deciding damages were more than the $4,500 small claims limit.

Milazzo-Shannon says she’s considered being a log home consultant after all she’s learned the last year. She’s looking forward to winter, when she and Rick will take more breaks.

“We don’t know how to relax anymore. We go to town to get dinner (and end up thinking), If we go home, we can do this and this and this,'” she said. “I went through two sanders. I sanded every log in this place.”

Next year she’ll be back at it, sanding water damage off the ceilings.

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