NORTH HARFORD HOME IMPROVEMENT

He did a terrible job. He put a drywall but no drywall paint. He nailed and sometimes covered them over with cellophane tape. He did not finish the job. We paid for items that we did not get. We were living overseas at the time. We weren't home for three and a half months which is what he said it would take three months to complete the job. After a year and a half, he still had not done the job and we had already moved back by then. He damaged our plumbing that we had to pay $500 to get fixed. He said he didn't. But we know he did because we were home for a death in the family in July and he had left his tools out in our basement and hadn't been there in months. I removed those things and put them in the bathroom closet downstairs. He had gone back upstairs to do some plumbing and broke a valve upstairs. Because I had put his tools and things down there, the water came down there and rusted on the paint that had already been done. He tried to tell us that he didn't do that. But we knew he did because the marks of the tools were still there, exactly as I would have them sitting there. We have nothing but terrible things to say. We did go after his license. But, he lost his license at that point. We just saw his truck back on the road about a month ago. So he is back in business again. We have warned everybody about this man. We have pictures to support everything. We went to Better Business Bureau and went to the State of Maryland to go after his license. But, he had no license to go after, at that point. It was started July of 2008 and was supposed to be finished by the end of September of 2008. That's what it says on our contract, that he would be finished within three months. And in three months, he didn't even have anything installed. He charged $71000 and he probably did about $50000 worth of work. And a lot of what he did do, we've had to have it redone. It was a complete basement remodel. Although, I did 90% of the demo myself. The only demo he did was the plumbing and taking up old Linoleum tiles that were really, really stuck hard to the ground. All the other demo I did myself. He enlarged and put in a new bathroom with bath tub and tiles. The tiles are cracking. The shower pan rocks back and forth which means it's going to slip and it can't be used until we can afford to get someone in to redo it. So basically we paid $70000 for a remodel we can't use a lot of. We had baseboard heating and he said he would want to reuse the baseboard heaters and its covers instead of buying new one. He did repaint them. But there were missing pieces. So heat never was able to be reflected out and the basement therefore is extremely cold. He was supposed to put in a waterline for the refrigerator. No waterline was put in. I had the refrigerator delivered and the people were looking for the waterline and there was none. So, I had to actually call in a new plumber to put in the waterline when he had already been paid to do so. He was paid to put in an entry door, from the outside. He did not do that. He was paid to put in a screen door. He did not do that. I had ordered brushed nickel fixtures for the bathroom. He said that he could get fixtures that were exactly the same but for less because he was a contractor. I knew that's true. So I returned the ones that I had bought and he came in with Moen fixtures. But once I was home and able to do the research on the fixtures he bought, they were the cheapest fixtures that you could possibly purchase from Moen. I returned $500 worth of fixtures and it was replaced with $90 worth of fixtures but I was charged $300 plus for the cost of the fixtures. He was supposed to put a diverter in because I had a shower handle as well as the regular normal shower stream coming in from the top of the wall. There was no diverter. So you could only use the handheld shower. There was no water coming in from the shower at the top. It's on and on. We had to have the whole basement repainted last year. The last time this house was repainted was 1986. We're very clean. We keep the walls clean. We don't put our hands on the wall. So to have to have your house repainted in three years is ridiculous. That's utterly ridiculous to have to repaint an entire basement. There's no children living here. This guy was just like horror walking. We've talked to other people who are contractors and electricians who came in to fix the electrical work that was done by the electrical contractors he brought in and they knew this man. They said, "There's no way he could have handled a project this big." That it was beyond his scope. That he could do something very small. He did call an electrical contractor to have can lights put in. The light bulbs were blowing every three weeks with the can lights. So we had to get that fixed. It cost us about $2000. The reason that they were doing what they were doing was that he had put them all on the same fuse as upstairs. So if anything in the house was on in the upstairs that was causing everything in the downstairs to heat up. I can just go on and on and on. I bought a $2000 plus tub. I never even got in it. He dropped something in it. It had to be something heavy, like a pipe wrench or something similar. He just said, "Oh, you all did that" and we were living overseas. There's no way we could do that. He seemed very responsive in the first part. He actually apologized thoroughly when he knew he hasn't finished it within a year. He said he was going to come and clean the house. He gave us really big apologies but none of that ever happened. He also walked away with our handles. Luckily, our kitchen company, that we bought the kitchen cabinets from, was nice enough to give us free cabinet hardware. But he walked away with our kitchen handles that we paid for. After we had been home for about two months, he did send one of his workers to our house to do work. The worker charged me $200 for the work he did on that day after I had already paid this man for the work that was in our contract. Every time we've seen him try to get a job since then, we have gone forward and shown people pictures and let them know what we went through to make sure he didn't get the job.

All of those things were on our contract but they were never done. He never did it and I kept asking when it was going to get done. So he finally sent out a worker to do it. The worker charged me a little over $200 for the work that I had already paid for in the contract.