Myriad Masonry Creations

This had the potential to be an A+ job.Gwen was very personable and had an impressive portfolio when we first met. We ignored the warning sign of needing a 50% down payment before the job would be started. They had a very large job to do. A large court yard area had lots of old bricks to be removed and stacked on palates. A couple of small trees had to be removed, a french drain installed. The court yard cement was poured and a sidewalk that ran about 20 ft to an existing pool deck, The concrete was textured to look like slate and 30x30 in squares on the diagonal pattern cut in the concrete with a concrete saw. So far so good. The subcontractor that did the tractor work for site prep was supposed to spread some left over gravel over our gravel driveway. I saw no evidence of extra gravel being spread, but he did use the tractor to smooth out the driveway where some pot holes had formed. The french drain was not installed properly in that one end protruded out of the ground slightly, that should have been covered with any extra gravel. The drain seems to function OK, I guess. This drain runs under the concrete slab and a part of it was broken. It supposedly was fixed before the concrete was poured, no way to tell if it was or not. The concrete was stained after the diagonal lines were cut. We wanted a sort of sandstone mottled tan/ brown / olive coloration, subdued warm neutral colors. The staining required some touch ups, never got to exactly what we wanted, but was not hideous and by this point we just wanted to be done with it. We were not living in the house at the time, living about 40 miles away, so we could not over see every phase of the operations, though we tried to be there most of the time. Clean up was haphazard at best. Splashed concrete on the side of the house and pool fence was never removed, although this was discussed with Gwen. Despite all of this, we decided to have Gwen resurface the aging pool deck. That required a $1000 down payment. Gwen was never able to provide that service. She was obviously having some financial difficulties and it took a long time to get our deposit back, in fact we never got the last $100.00. Had this been a well established firm, we would have sought legal action, but that seemed like a pointless exercise in futility in this case. |The cost seemed a little on the high side, but there was a lot of work to be done, moving those bricks by hand would have been tedious and back breaking work in itself and we were glad to pay someone to do it. We were trying to get our house ready to move into and had several other projects going on at the same time, we just wanted it over and done with. In the end it actually turned out OK. Although the execution was frustrating, the courtyard is functional and we use that area constantly, a great improvement over what was there to begin with. It's a shame Gwen's business acumen is so poor, she has the design talent to do really good work.

My patio is 30 years old and the concrete is breaking up. So I had these people pour concrete and they decorated it like it was stones. So now it looks like a stone patio because that is a very specialized concrete deal. They originally asked for $4,800 but I measured wrong so when they came out they said it was not quite as big as was estimated so they only charged me $4,000. They did a good job because the old patio was breaking up and I did not want to tear out the old concrete. So they just overlaid it with the new, decorated concrete. They gave me a two year warranty on their service.