VINNY THE TAPER INC

We hired ?Vinny the Taper? to put up drywall in our kitchen, following a renovation in which we gutted all walls except one (all exterior/exposed walls were brick). The company was recommended by one of our contractors and we hired them because they gave a competitive bid and the owner seemed experienced and knowledgeable. The company?s performance turned out to be a disaster and we would not recommend them to anyone. First, there were delays which threw off our schedule with other contractors down the road. But that was a minor issue compared to what happened when they showed up. The owner never set foot on the job and the crew that came to our house was not aware of any of the details that we had discussed with the owner. When the sheetrock installers arrived, they had no idea that we had agreed that they would frame parts of the wall even though that was clearly stipulated in the contract/proposal. In fact, this crew did not even have the tools needed for the framing job and admitted to never having done any framing before. We had to frame the walls ourselves while they were cutting sheetrock, engulfed in a cloud of drywall dust. On the exposed parts of the brick wall there were old furring strips with some nails sticking out and the crew never bothered to pull them out. They would try to tap them in; the nails would bend; and the surface became uneven so that the sheetrock was too uneven around windows, which was a problem for installing the window trim (the part of the trim that we had removed and reinstalled after drywall now protrudes beyond the rest of the window). The worst was that the crew installed molded wood in our house. To make the new walls level with the old ones that had not been gutted, we had agreed that Vinny would install 3/8? lathing strips on top of the furring strips that were attached to the brick walls. Toward the end of that part of the job, we noticed that the lathing strips were covered in black mold. When we brought the issue to the attention of the owners (who never set foot on the job), we were threatened that if we complained they would walk off the job and leave us stranded. Their bluff called, the owners of the company were forced to remove the sheetrock and the molded wood, but when the crew returned the following day they had no new lathing strips to install to finish the job. We had to purchase plywood and make our own strips and install them ourselves before the job would continue. For all the company?s bravado and claims of excellence and 40 years of experience, the only thing they seem to know how to do is screw sheetrock on wood? To make matters worse, the workers poured the coffee that we made for them down our heating duct from a floor register in the kitchen and I even caught them spitting on the floor in the kitchen when working. These violations of professionalism are so egregious that they begin to sound comical when you read them on a page. The taping was not much better than the sheetrock: screws are visible on parts of the wall; tape is visible in one part of the wall; nail heads popped out of the sheetrock when we screwed the cabinets in; the seams at the ceiling are wavy (I never saw the sheetrockers use a level even though they were supposed to level the joists on the ceiling using shims); the hole they cut around the hood range vent pipe is about two inches too large so the decorative flue around the pipe cannot cover it); cables for task light were buried in the sheetrock and others were nicked (thankfully our electrician Steve Petrillo, fixed this and several other errors; we would recommend him for any job: 203-641-7543); the taping crew did not sand the final coat of compound properly (I think they were here for 20 minutes to do this) and I had to hire another crew to finish sanding before we could paint; one small wall near the entry to the kitchen curves inward so much that it creates a half-inch gap between the wall and the top half of an 9-foot tall floor cabinet (thankfully, our cabinet maker, Dave Pillois went out of his way to fix this problem and several others not mentioned here; we recommend Dave, just like Steve, enthusiastically: 203-924-2972). Despite all these problems, we paid the full amount that we were quoted in the proposal. Two days after we mailed our check (which was 2-3 weeks after the job was finished), the owner showed up. He never bothered to look at his crew?s job performance or to ask if we liked the job. He said the only reason he came down was to get paid? at which point we had to ask him to leave. Overall, this was the most unprofessional, uncaring ? indeed hostile?experience we had with any of the fifteen or so contractors whom we hired for the kitchen remodel and as far as we can see, this company sets a new low for craftsmanship that will be hard to beat even by the most inexperienced and poorly trained contractor.