Builder Boy

HEAVEN AND H*** We contacted Builder Boy/Stucco Boy after having difficulties with Pella Windows and finding the recommended Pella Installer to be incompetent. Initially, Jereme was like someone riding in on a white horse to assist us with a terrible situation. We did appreciate this, and that Stucco Boy came in at a time when it was tough to get contractors. They installed our windows and did a re-stucco with smooth coat. The exterior crew was very good, especially Alvaro (courteous, helpful, skilled, and hard-working). The stucco work came out beautifully. The only problem on the exterior was two men on the hardscape crew, who chipped many of our block wall caps and also erred in the installation of some large exterior tiles. I had two of my employees (project manager/designer and foreman of family crew) checking on the work. Our foreman politely told the tile crew that they weren’t letting the bottom tiles dry sufficiently before putting on the other layers above. The man was rude and disrespectful. Later, it was found the tile did not laminate properly (as we expected) and it all had to be replaced. The Builder Boy employees tried to blame it on us, saying we forced them to work in the rain. This is all ridiculous, as we can’t force them and it was not raining on the installation days. In any case, for future work at the property Jereme did substitute them with a very competent crew. Jereme informed us that our bathrooms were all leaking, causing structural damage to the property, so they all had to be re-done. There are five bathrooms but we started with two. The interior work was a complete disaster. The foreman of this crew had a terrible attitude and was mean-spirited, blaming the many errors on us or his own workers when they were blameless. There were so many mistakes and the quality of the work was poor. The response of Builder Boy was, “put it on the touch-up list, in the end we’ll give you a great product.” This might be OK for other people, but our units were occupied. We had to constantly hound Builder Boy regarding the same errors over and over and they kept coming in and out for over 2 months, disturbing our tenants. I had to compensate the tenants for this, plus pay my 2 employees to be there most of the 2 months because I had lost confidence in Builder Boy. When the work was done, there were 5 leaks in the 2 bathrooms. They blamed it on the parts, but the leaks were duplicated in each bathroom, proof that the parts were installed incorrectly. For example, our employee noticed that they put the packets with the O-rings that came with the valves in the trash. Our employee informed them and this was ignored. Predictably, the valves leaked. Once the O-rings were installed correctly, the leaking stopped. Builder Boy has a project manager. She tried, but she must have been overloaded as she was not onsite very much. The company culture is the employees are afraid to tell the bosses what is going on. No one takes responsibility or apologizes, it’s just blaming other people, parts, weather. I told Jereme to just stop after the 2 bathrooms. It’s too bad, as our company has a huge amount of work to be done. We are now working with another contractor and we have not experienced any of these issues.