USA Contractors Group

We had mixed results. They got the ceiling down but it was not a clean job. They released a lot of dust into the air and throughout the house. I wouldn't call it 100% successful by any means. They did not contain it as well as it should have been. I would not recommend them. It was a long process in the whole remodeling job. The price was mid-range. They did manage to bring in people to correct things. If you count how many times it took to get things done, it was not a high quality job.

Let me preface this by saying that USA Contractors Group is not on Angie's List. They are, however, listed with Diamond Certified. This is a warning to Angie's List users to avoid this contractor. This renovation was a nightmare. For starters, it took about a year and a quarter for a job that was originally supposed to take 6 to 8 weeks. For a large part of that time, the contractor and his subs and their workers were completely out of touch and would not return calls. They became more attentive when I suggested that they had abandoned the job and that I would seek legal remedies. Unfortunately, I had to use that approach multiple times. Now to the actual work. The old bathroom was completely gutted, because there was significant water damage to the flooring due to leakage and to the walls and ceiling due to storm damage. The floor and wall water damage extended into the dining room, necessitating floor and wall repair there as well. The rebuilding seemed to be going pretty well initially, but then we ran into complications. We wanted some improvements: tile flooring, floor heating beneath the tile, built-in vanity and full-width mirrored medicine chest, new recessed light in the ceiling, lighting over the vanity and mirrored medicine chest, lighting in the closet, bi-fold doors on the closet, new pocket door in place of a hinged door for the "water closet" (the separate room containing the shower and toilet) and hinged glass door on the shower in place of the existing sliding doors. The biggest set of blunders came about with the tile work. Because it was improperly installed (tiles not level and misaligned) the entire floor tile work had to be ripped out and replaced, and of course when it came out the custom under-tile floor heating pad was destroyed, necessitating another new floor heating pad to replace the ruined one. The shower tile had to be replaced along with the wallboard underneath because the door opening was not plumb, and the glass door installer would not hang a door until it was plumb. In addition to the walls being out of plumb, the tiles were not installed correctly, and two actually fell off when they were bumped. We also had a strip of expensive decorative tile that was so misaligned that it turned out not to be decorative, but a serious visual detraction. We complained and withheld payment, and the contractor sent in a different set of people to re-do the tile work, to plumb the walls, etc. (The last sub-contractor they sent in to finish up our list of requirements was very good, reliable, and actually communicated with us.) In addition to the problems we had with USA Contractors Group management, Lou's Doors, whom they used to supply our new doors, managed to mess up as well. We wanted a glass insert in the new sliding door between the vanity room and the "water closet," and Lou's Doors said they could do that. Well, we had to send back the sliding door because it was the wrong width, and also had to send back the bi-folds for the closet because they were the wrong height. In addition to the bathroom renovation, we made a side contract for some work in the adjoining dining room and kitchen, mostly for ceiling repair and new recessed lighting with additional switches. As part of the work on the kitchen ceiling, we wanted to have an exhaust fan removed. After removing the ceiling fan, the subcontractor attempted to patch the ceiling with what he called a "California patch" which consisted of nothing more than placing a circle of wallboard in the hole remaining when the fan was removed, then taping around the circle. The result was an uneven ceiling with a circle of wallboard that was held in place only by tape. We would not accept that, and they had to do what they should have initially and replace part of the ceiling with a larger piece of wallboard that spanned across the rafters and was screwed into place. Then they had to make multiple attempts to level the ceiling there. I have to say that we are happy overall with the new lighting and the ceiling repairs. We also learned that we had to monitor everything the workers were doing. Left to their own devices, the bi-fold doors would have been hung wrong, baseboard molding would have been installed wrong around the closet, etc. We wound up paying separately for a licensed plumber to re-install the toilet because the contractor's workers didn't know how to install the new toilet with the increased depth below it due to the new floor tile. The same licensed plumber stabilized the new shower head and re-set the shower controller, which had not been installed properly. In addition we had to contract separately for the glass shower door and the custom vanity/medicine chest. The only reason I did not fire these guys was because I had already paid too much to them for the work they wound up redoing and I could not afford to bring in a new contractor without losing several thousand dollars. So I wound up essentially bullying the contractor into completing the job to the satisfaction of my wife and myself. We learned a lot, at our expense, and I feel sorry for the next contractor we hire, because we will be breathing down his neck the whole time.