Herrera Tile

Terrible!! Joe Herrera told me that he would use plastic to tarp off areas and cover furniture, and an exhaust system on the machine used to break up the tile would carry a lot of the dust outside. Not the case at all. The house was a mess and if I had not taken some precautions myself, it would have been worse. No rooms were tarped off. No exhaust on the piece of equipment. There was only a fan pointed outside. All windows were open...AC was running full blast. It was a mess when I arrived home. Young people too young to be working were on his crew, Joe Herrera I assume was the supervisor. He did not remove all the thin set, and said that if he were laying the tile, he would just lay over the remaining thin set on the floor!! He damaged baseboard beyond repair and destroyed our transition trim from our wood floor to the tile. I was overwhelmed when he said the job was finished. And it was my HUGE mistake...that I wrote him a check before my husband arrived home. By the time I went to my computer to transfer funds from one account to another, he had cashed the check!! He was supposed to return the next day to do some additional work, and did not return. We had to have walls painted, install new baseboards, and have all the transition trim redesigned and installed. All at an additional and unexpected cost to us. When my husband arrived home, he asked why the thin set was still on the parts of the concrete...and I had a melt down as the whole experience was more than I could handle!! I did not know where to start to try and clean up. My husband immediately got on his hands and knees to begin to finish by hand the job that Joe was paid to do. Need I say more? As I said, my mistake was in paying Joe. I should have said I would have my husband come home to write the check after he looked at their work. A check he would not have written.

Bought a house in April and spent four months remodeling it. On the recommendation of a salesman at World of Tile in Glendale AZ I hired Joe?s crew to remove all the carpet and tile before the remodel and then come back and put in the tile afterwards. They spent two days on the first part of the project and got all of the carpet removed and most of the tile. I expected that they would have removed all of the tile, but they left some in the laundry and half bath. I?d wanted to swap out a pedestal sink for a cabinet, but with the old tile still there I couldn?t, so Joe promised that they?d do it for me when they came back to put in the tile and I was fine with that. It?s normal to bring the flooring people in after the painters as the last contractors on a remodel. This is so the painter doesn?t accidentally spill or spray anything on the floors and because carpet and because the tile people are usually clean as used to being the finishing crew. Unfortunately Joe?s crew had no respect for the other trades work. It was expected that the painter might have to touch up some of the base boards because of grout smudges, but the extra work Joe?s crew caused was unbelievable. Their work was so sloppy the painter had to repaint all of the baseboards and many of the walls in my 2,700 sq ft house. I had specified that we use the best Sherwin-Williams paint available that even on sale was $45 a gallon. The main reasons were for its durability and easy to clean nature. Thus this could have been prevented if the tile guys had just wiped off the boards and walls as they worked through the house. When the tile guys accidentally touched walls it would have been easy to clean off if they just used a paper towel, but instead they just ignored it and let it dry. That required the painter to scrape and sand those spots off of the walls and then repaint. This added a lot of work for my painter and delayed the project finish. One thing positive about the tile work was that they made really nice cuts around objects, but overall their tile work was below average. Some tiles are noticeably higher that adjacent tiles so things like chair legs and high-heels can catch. In other spots the underlying floor has significant dips that should have been leveled out before laying the tile. They did sand down some high spots, so I don?t know why they didn?t address the dips too. I specified epoxy grout throughout the house and I guess they had to learn on the job how to apply it. As a result the grout is unevenly applied and even missing in some joints. One other annoying thing is you can hear quite a few tiles ping ? that sound they make when not enough mastic was used to put them down. Even my cats have noticed that sound. Joe?s crew was supposed to put the toilets back in after the tile work was done and the cabinet for the half bath, but none of that happened. Instead I had to do that ? not a really big deal except that it turns out that in the process of removing the old tile they broke the toilet flanges on two of the three toilets in the house. Thus I only had one working toilet when I moved in and had to have a plumber repair the other two flanges before I could put the other toilets in. After Joe?s crew left I discovered that they had left me with quite a cleanup project of my own in the garage. They had trashed my almost new work sink with tile and grout debris, so that will have to be replaced. They also left hardened grout sponges and other debris scattered all over the garage floor. The floor had been epoxied by the previous owner, but now it has big globs of mastic and other tile compounds stuck to it. Normally, I?d call the contractor back in to fix these things, but I really don?t want to see or hear from them ever again. My hope is that by submitting this report someone else will not go through what I did earlier this year.