STEVE CASTLEMAN CONSTRUCTION

Steve is a very pleasant person, and he hired wonderful trim carpenters. They were careful and skilled. That was the high point of the experience. He cut many corners, and his work has not held up well. As an example, in moving out the breakfast room wall, he needed to put in footings, which we told him. He said no, that he would tie the addition in to the existing building with concrete rebar. Within a year after the job was done, the floor had sunk noticeably on that side, and there was cracking in the wall on the other side of the room, indicating stress on that wall. In 2010 we had an engineer and another contractor evaluate the breakfast room and repair it. The rebar had just been thrown in loose when the concrete was poured for the plate below the breakfast room. The loose rebar had simply washed together in a pile in the new concrete and wasn't attached to the existing house at all. Needless to say, the repairs cost at least 4 to 5 times as much as putting in the footings properly in the first place. That's perhaps the worst example, but the whole project was done in a similar ways and we continually had to struggle to get things done right. He hired some of his unemployed buddies to paint the breakfast room, and they left the cans of $40 paint that Steve had bought for the job open while they went out to eat. We also couldn't get him to finish up the job. He left a hole in the soffit outside the screen porch uncovered; we wanted it covered but could never get him to come back and simply put a cover over it.