Matthew E Croft LLC

Not well. We had references for Matthew from friends who had small remodels done successfully and he came highly recommended. We had a meeting with Matthew, told him our budget was about $100k for adding a second floor. After discussing our ideas for the addition - a master bedroom, bath and walk-in closet with the rest of the space open for art studio - he said it was possible but suggested adding an additional $25k for safety's sake. When we said we could probably find the extra he claimed that "at 125k, we are golden". I should add that we told him that we understood that we would have to do a fair bit of the finish work ourselves to keep costs down. We gave him a retainer fee of $5000 and shook hands on our agreement. We had plans drawn by an architect, gave those to Matthew. The remodel would require a total tear-off of the roof so, naturally this would be a summer job. He said " when you get your permit let me know and we'll get started". This is when he disappeared. We got our permit in July and never heard back from him until the end of September, despite several inquiries. He brought us his final bid which was for $227,000 - $100,000 over our "golden" budget. At this point, we decided that we couldn't afford the work at this price, sent him a letter notifying him of that and asked for him to figure out his costs of preparing the budget and to refund the remainder to which he replied that he would do so within the week. This is the second time he disappeared. Several unanswered emails, and texts and 3 months later, we got a portion of our deposit back, in the end, charging us $2400 for his bid. So, he knew our "golden" budget, knew he couldn't do the job for that and through non-communication, wasted our summer construction window where we could have gotten a different builder, presented the inflated bid in the hope we'd just agree to it and then made us wait for an additional 3 months wondering if and when we'd see our refund. This is the sort of behavior and business-dealing that gives contractors a bad name, the sort that wouldn't be tolerated in most any other business and we thought you all should know.