CENTAUR CONSTRUCTION

The price wasn’t the issue. The thing that I disliked about him was that he was taking our money; the money that we paid him. In other words, we paid some excess amount of money for the electrician. The owner of the company used that money to fix up the apartment that he owned in Delaware. He did pay the subs who then would come back on us. My windows still aren’t right because the people they ordered the windows from delivered the wrong ones. They wouldn’t change them because Centaur was not paying them appropriately. The building inspector really saved us from having a terrible job done. He wouldn’t issue a “Certificate of Occupancy” until things were fixed and done. It was unbelievable awful. We had a couple of things redone but not everything. He had some good subcontractors. Their workers were responsive; the foreman was very responsive. But the owner didn’t follow through with anything. They didn’t do anything. The price was okay. I think the architect who owns the business didn’t mean for this to happen at all. I think it was just a bad timing with the economy.

The workers and sub-contractors performed well. However, money we paid was not always paid to the provider of materials and sub-contractors. Ex. we still do not have the correct windows, because the contractor did not pay the providers of the Anderson windows. To get our light fixtures, we had to pay the electrical contractor directly. At one point we were told (by a worker) that the owner was not paying his employees. The aluminum cladding under the back door (which was supposed to be a full French door, but is a "French-style door" in which only one door opens) was not done, the parging to cover the outside of the concrete in back of the house is coming loose (less than a year) and the drainage from the gutters/downspouts tends to put the water in the basement. We were asked to buy the underground drainpipe (which we did), but it was never installed. As a result of the non-payment to sub-contractors and suppliers, we were served with a mechanic's lien by a lumber company (the window people). The contractor subsequently settled this matter, without us having to go to courtm but this was very stressful. Thank goodness we live in a township with a very strong Inspector! He ensured that appropriate codes were follwed without shortcuts, but this meant that several of the things they did, that they assured us were OK (such as the wallboard covering styrofoam forms in the basement) had to be redone to meet local code, putting us further behind schedule. During the course of the job, the contractor did not have sufficient equipment to remove the accumlated trash in the yard, so it piled up in front of our house. We were told that the dump truck that could haul away the debris was not inspected, and we had to wait. Needless to say, our punch list was never completed, and we have crown molding that separates when the weather gets cold and dry. A word to the wise -- if the contractor you are thinking of doing business with, does not have enough funding to keep his equipment in repair, run the other way! We should have realized that a contractor who does not have the funds to get a truck inspected may be having financial difficulties.