Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Things we had to finish for our contractor

So you've heard me lament about the contractor we hired for the project, now that the bank has FINALLY sent us the last check and the project is closed, I'll post here what he failed to complete for us. Before you ask, why didn't you make him finish it, go through a renovation of this scale and then we'll talk. Eventually you lose the will to live, nevermind about fight with your contractor who only shows up 1 our of every 5 days he says he will be there, and you are incidentally stuck with.

It's worse than a bad marriage (from my vantage point of being in a perfect marriage) because he already has all your money, its not like you stand to lose half...


1.       Kitchen cabinets, you installed them and the one that you installed had a stain on it that had to be removed. I had to finish the unfinished cabinets you bought, and buy an end panel so that it was truly finished.
2.       You never finished installing the dishwasher, and Max had to undo the electrical you did on the dishwasher as in his words “If you had put your hand on the dishwasher and the sink you would have been electrocuted. I could lose my license if an inspector saw this” So I’d not recommend doing your own electrical work.
3.       I had to redo the installation of the sinks plumbing in the kitchen as your install was not up to code and leaked all over the place. Also you cracked the granite in several places and left large blobs of silicone everywhere.
4.       You never removed the baseboards in the kitchen, despite me paying you extra to do so. And the bypass you put in leaked as soon as we turned the heating on because you didn’t clean the pipe before you soldered it, despite my asking you to test the system before you left. You really should stop doing plumbing and get a plumber, you don’t know what you are doing… it’s too bad for you, I paid some other guy 800$ to fix it all.
5.       You didn’t finish the trim around the top of the kitchen before the electrical inspection, I had to do that to ensure we would pass.
6.       The painting that your team did was really cut rate. We have several patches around the house where they didn’t complete more than one coat, doors downstairs in the master bedroom etc. The rooms they did finish they splattered paint everywhere requiring me to refinish the floors upstairs, and to spend a large amount of time cleaning the brickwork downstairs.
7.       You didn’t install the bathroom or master bedroom doors correctly, they wouldn’t close until I had to fix them.
8.       You didn’t complete the flooring downstairs, I ended up doing the trim around the outsides of the rooms and around doors because you left it for two weeks.
9.       You didn’t complete the dry wall in the laundry room, despite my reminding you a half dozen times while the team was still there, you never finished it.
10.   The bathroom downstairs was never painted at all despite our contract stating you would paint every room in the house
11.   You never replaced the molding in the basement sun room around the ceiling, so there is a gap all around the room from the wood paneling to the ceiling.
12.   You didn’t install the new doors I paid extra for correctly, there is no molding around the outside or the inside and the bottom of the door is not sitting on anything, whenever you step on it, it bends down till it reaches the foundation and you can see daylight under it. You didn't finish the trim aroud the inside of the doors.
13.   When you installed the windows you didn’t trim up to repair the damage you caused. This was apparently “extra” you might want to let people know that when quoting them a price, then they won’t be so irritated with you for nickel and diming them after the fact.
14.   The siding took 6 weeks, and the first time there was a wind pieces fell off the house. Turns out that you never even nailed down the top layer of the siding around the house, counting on the soffit to hold It up… You also claimed that re-installing the shutters after replacing the siding was extra, again a customer service note (since I manage a department that is customer oriented) in your quote just write down that the shutters are not included, you’d be amazed how different peoples reaction will be…
15.   The roofing on the back of the house was decoupled from the side of the house when you did the siding, and never nailed back down. So when the wind blew, the roof would float up and water could get underneath ruining the newly installed ceiling. 10 roofing nails, and we could have saved hundreds in damages.
16.   You broke the back window in April, and didn’t fix it for the duration of the project.
17.   You never tested the heating system, when I turned it on, it leaked in the garage and ruined the drywall in there that I had put up for the fire inspection.
18.   Your team constantly took supplies that I had bought, or used my tools to work on their stuff leaving them everywhere. While all the money is coming from me in the end, you should consider that anything you didn’t bring to the work site, really isn’t yours to use however you wish… I had to rent a truck to get stuff to the house, and again to replace the stuff your team used.

So if there is ever a question of would you recommend this contractor to anyone, I would have to reply with a resounding no. There is no one on this planet that I dislike enough to send this tool their way. 

2 comments:

  1. WOW! I hope you reported him to the Better Business Bureau and the bank. They both need to know of this Ass Wipe!

    ReplyDelete