Markus Maximus Renovations

It started very slowly. He told us that the granite would take weeks, so there was no point in getting all the work done only to have to wait on the granite. So we were patient. Some days/weeks would go by with no work done at all. Then he would call and 3 or 4 guys would come and do work for a few hours, then leave. He was always easy to get ahold of and always returned calls/texts promptly with assurances that everything was going as planned. After a few weeks of this, we asked to see the progress on the kitchen cabinets. He told us to meet him at the cabinet maker's "shop" which we did. The "shop" was a converted garage behind the man's uncle's home. The "cabinet maker" was the same man who had been to our house several times to paint and do electrical work. The cabinets were laid out on the gravel of this backyard for us to see. They were absolutely awful. We later found out they were made of bass wood which is very soft and not appropriate for cabinets. We had agreed that the shelving and interiors would be melamine, but the panel inserts were also made of melamine (we had him change this). He did not have a router that could make the trim I had asked for, so the sample door was sort of rounded as if with sandpaper. I was shocked, but Mark assured us that his work was good and we should not judge him just because his shop was not professional. We let the work continue as at this point we had already paid $9000. When the cabinets arrived at our house a few weeks later on the back of a flat bed trailer, it pretty much went downhill from there. The cabinets were absolutely awful. Our family members who came over got this look of shock on their faces when they walked into our kitchen. We were trying to believe Mark when he would tell us that this was just part of the process and that we would be so happy when everything came together. But we weren't. The drawers were glued together with this gloppy silicone. Screws were sticking out inside the drawer box. The doors weren't straight even after multiple adjustments to the hinges. The base unit was 3/4 inch too short (compared to the standard height of our existing center island) and his remedy for this was to shim them from underneath with particle board. The paint was splotchy, uneven, rough in some places, shiny in others, and the color wasn't even. He told us that he underestimated how much paint he would need and had to keep ordering more. They needed to be re-painted, so he said our only option was to spray them inside our home. We left town for a week at Thanksgiving and told him to come in and get it done while we were gone (project started in September). Our neighbor let his crew in everyday. We returned after 8 days to find almost nothing had been done, and the paint was un-changed. Sears arrived to install our appliances and the double oven would not fit in the cabinet he made. And to make matters worse, we made the dyer mistake of paying him in full before we left. He said he was out of capital and since the project had gone on so long, he needed to be paid. However, his crew was constantly complaining that they weren't getting paid and one worker even went as far as to ask US for money. That fault was our own and we learned a very hard lesson about how to pay contractors. Ultimately we had to hire a new contractor and a new cabinet maker to come in and remove his cabinets, fix his shoddy work, and start over. He admitted to us during one of last meetings that he knew the work was not good and that he was going to call in a retired master cabinet maker to help fix the situation. He didn't. My husband asked for a refund of $4000 as partial restitution for the cabinets that were never delivered. Mark refused, as expected, and we have not had much other contact with him. He is a really nice guy, but he just could not come through. He claimed he did 400 kitchens last year, but after my experience I just can't believe this is true. He had trouble figuring out how much paint to buy for the walls and cabinets, his truck broke down in front of our house twice, and he had no trash-removal method in place other than to use our personal trash cans. His painters spray-painted our cabinets on the side of our house and washed and dumped their paint buckets into our river rock landscaping. I should have checked with the Better Business Bureau before hiring him at the very least because I came to find out he is rated F. He is not bonded or insured (or he never provided us with this documentation), nor is he a member of NARI. If you are looking to get something done for super cheap and quality is not at all an issue for you, then I guess I might recommend him. However, if you want quality and beautiful craftmanship in your home, I would check Angie's reviews, BBB, and seek out a NARI contractor. I will admit that I am a bit of a perfectionist, but we told him this from the start and he was confident he could deliver. I truly believe he wanted to deliver, but he just lacks the experience, capital, and professional crew at this point in his career.