Mountain Homes Construction Inc

Description of Work: Mountain Homes, or rather Mr. Marc Talen who is Mountain Homes, was hired to oversee the remodel of our kitchen to include removing and restoring the ceiling, replacing the floor, painting, considerable modifications to the electrical service, installing new cabinets, and finish work to complete the job. The first week he was on time and demo'd the kitchen and did the rough in electrical. He then attempted to remove the old vinyl which was glued down. After demonstrating his frustration in this unexpected turn, Marc decided to cut up and to remove the entire sub floor and underlayment and even though plastic doorway covers were deployed, the house was now filled with saw dust. On Friday, the new floor was finished but Marc decided not to remove the laundry room or bathroom floor (as his contract required). The bill for the first week (36 hrs of work) was $6100. We were advised to have our floor contractor (one of those cost saving measures Marc doesn't handle or oversee) come in and install the floor. Installing the floor this early in the process seems odd to us, but he's the expert so we followed his plan. The second week was consumed with putting up the new ceiling. One day to install sheetrock and two days to prepare it for texturing. Each day started at about 10AM and ended at as little as 11:30AM. The bill for the second week was $1300 for 16 hrs. of work. The third week is when we learned how poor a choice we had made for a contractor. Monday, Marc applied the texture late in the day. Tuesday his painter arrived to paint while the texture was still damp. The walls were painted but the painter declined to paint the ceiling, So the painter returned on Wednesday to paint the ceiling and with as little as an hour for the paint to dry, Marc starts installing the cabinets. So the ceiling texture was still wet when the paint was applied and the paint was still wet when the cabinets were installed. Again another red flag warning of the bad situation we have placed ourselves in. One should keep in mind that Marc's start time varied from Noon to 2:30PM this entire week. On Friday we get a bill for $5600 for a total of 6hrs of work done by Marc. The fourth week began with the seams in the ceiling sheetrock beginning to fail and show. When this was brought to Marc's attention he said he'd fix it but, "the cure is worse than the illness in this case." which I took to mean he'd make a big mess and push back the completion date. He offered a $500 reduction in our contact amount for his error. At his point we wanted Marc out of our house so we took the offer figuring we could fix the sheetrock at a later date. Work in the fourth week consisted of trim work for the cabinets, facilitating the granite counter tops, and fine tuning floor trim. During this time we had to repair one scratch to the cabinets which we found acceptable. Marc's start times varied from 10:45AM to 3PM so one can see that not much got accomplished. Marc indicated he would forgo payment for the 4th week and take a final check at the end of the fifth week. On the fifth week Marc worked one day, Thursday, and put up some lights and installed some appliances. He did put in 8 hrs that day and left with a check for $1402 for week 4 + 5. We were very happy to see Marc leave. Since there were items in his contract he failed to complete, he gave us a $500 reduction in the negotiated contract price.