The Handy Man

Jeremy juggled budget consciousness with attention to detail. He arrived prepared daily. Would recommend for handy person services.

He was terrible and completely unqualified. He was recommended by my neighbor. We had to tear down our garage after he worked on it and we lost about $12,000 because we had to have someone to re-do it. I reported him to the Better Business Bureau and the state attorney general. His work was awful and the roofing was terrible. We were stupid because we did not go through Angie's List or get good recommendations before hiring him.

We met Jeremy Scott, owner of the Handy Man, 313 Cherry Hill Court, Versailles KY 40383 in July of 2012. He was from Michigan and apparently had another business there called Omega Custom Builders. Jeremy was working on the house next door and we discussed building a new garage because our current structure was no longer stable. He declared he had built many such structures and he sent us some pictures. In late August, he contacted us again and we decided to move forward with the garage for a price we felt was fairly reasonable. My husband and I made a huge mistakes in not securing more information about Jeremy and nailing down a number of details about the job, but we were just trusting. We did discuss a number of details, but they were not all in the contract. Jeremy and I signed a contract on September and I gave him half of the money for the job, which was VERY stupid. Ultimately paid the equivalent of the entire contract before we realized he had NO idea what he was doing and truly didn?t care. At the end, we had a partially built garage that was poorly constructed. Here is a list of some of what we found: He convinced us we had to rebuild in the same place with the dilapidated trusses and studs or move the structure way into the yard because of zoning. Really, we only had to move it about a foot at the most. We started out with strange challenges and restrictions unnecessarily. He said the building inspector told him it was necessary to leave the old planks intact and build onto them, but we found out he could have taken them off after supporting the structure. (All this was unnecessary though; we could have just rebuilt it). Jeremy was supposed to remove the existing asphalt, pour footers, then pour a slab. He skipped the footers. He actually told us there were already footers and we found out after we fired him that there weren?t. Jeremy did not extend the slab under the back wall, so that wall still had the original wood to ground contact. He built the wall on the rotten wood. He only installed a plate along the side walls. Even though the foam seal was right there, he did not put any between the plate and the cement. The roofline wasn?t straight and had dips where the water would not drain. After the inspector checked the holes he had dug for the 6x6 post, Jeremy filled them in with dirt even though he had 10 bags of quickcrete sitting right there. He made the carport too low for many SUVs to drive under it and made other poor design decisions while we were not on site. He put untreated plywood over the old planks and let it touch the ground. When I asked, he said it just had to be an inch away. That is when we realized we had to fire him. By the time we fired him, we had spent 156% of the materials budget and paid 2/3 of the labor. The garage was 2/3 finished at best but most of what was done will have to be reworked in order to be acceptable.

The owners name is Jerome Scott. I spent about $2000 or $3000 and I thought that it was quite reasonable. It is a small company and they try very hard to finish the work. I would not say that they are reliable because it took much, much longer than he said he would.