Pinon Pete Productions

Description of Work: We hired "Pinon Pete" on the advice of a friend who had worked with him to build a new fireplace in our home. The initial consultation was fine - Peter Kunkel, the owner, visited our home with his photo album of previous jobs. He agreed to build a new kiva style fireplace in our living room (replacing a previous kiva fireplace that had already been demolished because it was deteriorating). Peter quoted the full price of the project - from start to finish, including the chimney and finish coat - to be $5,000. He said it would take him about a month to complete. This conversation took place in June 2008. Peter showed up at the beginning of July to start work. We were doing other remodeling projects on the house, so there were people at the house working on various projects almost every day throughout the summer. My husband and I have very busy jobs, and my husband was out of town for much of the summer. Peter worked very slowly, showing up some days and not others. I came home from work one day to find that he has helped himself to a bottle of sake from our refrigerator that had been a gift and we were saving for a special occasion. I didn't know whether to be more concerned about the seeking and taking of something that didn't belong to him or working on our fireplace while under the influence! It made me wonder what else he did in my house while I was not at home. I would often come home and find that Peter had been drinking during the day... The end of the month came and went...then the next month. We were getting so weary of living with the dust, dirt, concrete and filth in our living room that accompanies an unfinished kiva fire place. When it rained at night, I'd have to jump out of bed and put a trash can under the open chimney because the water would just pour in. This went on through July and August. Finally in September we confronted Peter that the job was far from completed and way past the one month deadline he has promised us. This is when he started to get shady. At this point he had finished the firebox itself, but the hearth was unfinished and the fireplace only has a crumbly gray coat, no finish quote. He began asking us for more money - another $400 for flashing to keep water out around the chimney, more money to finish the hearth, the finish coat, etc. We were dumbfounded. He stopped showing up for work when we told him we were not paying another dime and that we expected him to finish the job for the agreed upon amount of $5000. Ge was unresponsive to our many phone calls. My husband finally finished building and mudding the hearth himself. That winter, the chimney leaked (water came in through the ceiling around the seam of the chimney from rain and melting snow) and my husband had to seal the leaks. To this day, we still do not have a finish coat because we don't have the money to finish it and don't know how even if we did. We've become a little wary of fireplace builders!