GONZALEZ CONSTRUCTION

We hired Ernesto Gonzalez through his General Contractor Licensure to frame and roof our new home. He assured us in the begining when we went over our plans (4 months before be began to build) that he was experienced and understood the plans and type of truss system for our roof, etc. He was gracious and accomodating, UNTIL WE SIGNED THE BID! Then, all of the sudden he was mister "this is going to cost you more, this is not my job". Further, he called multiple times a day to me at work asking questions about the plans, stating he did not understand them! He yelled at the truss company over the phone and hung up on the engineer when they tried to explain how to put our trusses on the roof (Yep, the ones he said he knew and had done before) suddenly he was clueless! It continued with his bad behavior until we started noticing discrepencies in the building of the house vs what was on our plans. Everytime we would ask him about it, he would blame our plans. He and his crew arrived 1 day early after our front porch concrete had been poured. The proceeded to roof over the porch and damaged our fresh concrete with big gouges and scrapes. When we confronted him he stated "myself nor my men were there that week"! We couldn't believe it. The code inspector saw him there that week AND he had signed for a delivery that week. We had to place a claim with his insurance co. They settled with us, stating that Mr. Gonzalez was being deceptive. However, that was not the worst of it! When we had the framing inspected by the Code inspector, he found massive flaws in the the building that did not follow our plans as written. Headers were either the wrong size, spliced in span, and/or missing entirely! This was a huge safety issue. We had engineered flooring as TGI's to be installed per the plans, they found he had omitted several of them and placed others not per plan. Engineers had to come to our home and calculate the loads for the entire 2 story home and come up with a correction plan because it was unsafe. Our staircase was not supported and the rise over run was incorrect. At this point, we were afraid to have him come back to make the corrections, because it was obvious he either was incompetent or didn't care. We paid him the first half of his payment, but withheld the 2nd half and hired another contractor to complete the revisions. Gonzalez then put a lien on our property and did not inform us. When we finally finished the house 2 1/2 months later than planned, our title company found the lien. We had to hire an attorney and put $11,000 in an escrow account inorder to get him to drop the lien so we could get a mortgage. That took another 2 months! Now, we are being sued by him for the 2nd half of his payment that he thinks we owe him. We are countersuing for the additional $19,000 that he has cost us. He changed his company name after he couldn't get insurance in May 2008 to Gonzalez and Sons Construction.