DECORATIVE CONCRETE SURFACING LLC

On 7-20-2015 I hired Al Mcfadyen of Decorative Concrete Surfacing, LLC, aka ?Bad A** Concrete?, to apply approximately 650 sq ft of an epoxy coating with mica flakes to my garage floor. He told me it would be ?bad a** concrete? when done and he couldn?t wait to take photos and show it off on his facebook page. Things did not turn out as planned and it now looks like ?Half a** concrete? On 7-22-2015 they started by sanding, grinding and prepping the floor as necessary. Then they put down a black epoxy base and spread mica flakes into the epoxy base. Once the base dried they came back and vacuumed the excess mica flakes from the floor. The next step is to sand down the sharp edges of all the mica flakes with a swing arm and to cover the flakes with a clear epoxy to seal it all in and to cover any sharp edges. Al Mcfayden stated one of his guys burned through the surface with the ?swing arm? and that it caused unevenness in the coloring of the mica flakes. He said he would come back and put another top coat on it so it all blends together. When he was done it was obvious that the back half of the garage did not match the front half of the garage and you could still see the burn marks in the surface. Al admitted to the problem and stated they would come back and top coat the entire floor to make it right. On 8-2-2015 they came back and put a new top coat on the entire floor. Then they sanded the mica flakes again and left burn marks throughout the garage again. They also spread the clear coat very unevenly leaving some spots of the floor look dull, other spots looked shiny and some spots are so thick it looks wet like a puddle. They also did not put enough clear around the perimeter of the garage leaving very sharp mica flakes which ended up cutting the bottom of my daughters foot when she walked across it. At this point I had given up hope that Al had the skill level needed to properly sand and finish this type of floor so I asked him if he could at least come back and take care of the sharp spots in the middle of the floor as well as the entire perimeter. On 9-8-2015 he finally sent out a couple of his guys that stated they had been working for Al for less than a year and were not real familiar with how this floor should have turned out. They also told us that the guys who originally did our floor had been fired. They sanded down some spots with a drywall sanding screen and spread some more clear with a paint brush. They missed several of the sharp areas again. We asked Al one more time what he can do about this. He told us he wasn?t sure because he had not seen the finished floor since it was redone and that he was not willing to come out and look at the floor because a text we sent him had a nasty undertone to it. The real reason is because he had already been paid the full amount of the job and he was not capable of doing it correctly. He told us that he was experienced in this type of work but after witnessing his incompetence over a period of 6 weeks I doubt they have ever done this type of work before. I am now in the process of hiring an experienced concrete surfacing company to come out and redo this disaster of a garage floor that Al Mcfayden and his crew installed. I would not recommend these guys to do any work unless you are looking for half a** concrete.

Al McFadyen showed up with a proposal to do indoor concrete staining in my living room and most of the first floor, and another proposal was signed on both accounts for him to proceed. The prices were high, but he sold me on top quality, and that was what I wanted. He DID do a very nice job on the basement floors in my house previously, and also did some exterior foundation work at my house, with the only hiccups occurring on the exterior work, with which I was satisfied with the outcome. When he started the interior work, I had the floors prepped by a professional contractor, who coordinated with Al to make sure the prep work was done to his desired specs. He said the work was good, so he did his work on the base of those floors....when the base work was done they showed a horrible grid pattern, which Al then stated was their because not enough staples were used to secure the mesh on the subfloor. That would have been remedied easily if Al had inspected the floors thoroughly before doing his work. He didn't. He charged me $590 to fix his oversight. I paid it. He showed up to fix it. He did the concrete staining, and finished his work there, and I paid him for it without being able to look at it closely as we could not enter the house for a 2 day period afterwards. The floors looked terrible. You could easily see a grid pattern in the floor that was supposed to be fixed. He offered to fix them, and when they did try to fix them, the floors looked worse because they tried pouring more material in, which didn't match and then recoating with a clear coat. The floors were supposed to be like marble floors, but got very dark with all the material they used to cover the grid pattern, and then the clear coat was very uneven and wavy, with an incredible amount of dirt in the clear, which was observed in the floors by several people immediately upon completion of the job. Around the same time, his subcontractors showed up for the exterior work, formed up a staircase on the side of my house, and prepped the other areas for concrete. The city inspector informed me that Al had rebar holding the stairs to the house, but no foundation underneath, so they would not permit him to pour unless he supported the stairs with proper footings or cut the rebar. He cut the rebar, even though doing so guaranteed instant failure. They poured the stairs and garage floor, despite warnings that the frost line hadn't receded enough and settling issues might occur. The stairs sunk into the ground immediately, 1/8 inch the first day, and 1/8 to 3/16 of an inch for the next few days after that (Al claimed heavy rains caused this, even though the stairs had sunk over an inch before a drop of rain fell). The floor in the garage cracked into small pieces and sunk over 8 inches in the first 2 weeks. Both are junk. When I contacted Al about this, furious, we finished our conversation and I was sent an email stating that no further work would be done until I signed an amended agreement saying that I would agree to the fixes he would make, nothing more, and he would walk away. I wanted to terminate the agreement, but he would only do so if I paid an additional 5k (almost the entire amount left owed) AND end up with only half the concrete being poured and floors that needed to be replaced immediately. WOW. I ended up signing an amendment, because otherwise I would have NO useful concrete or floors, and he would basically have all my money. He showed up, and poured the rest, ALL poor in quality, and NONE of it up to industry standards. He poured a formed wall with only 4 inch footings, and once again had to cut the rebar from the house because the last pour didn't have proper footings. It will fail in short order. He "fixed" the floors to the extent he was willing to fix them. Even more dirt in the clear coat, and even more marks and scratches, and several exposed areas by the kitchen cabinets with no material at all on them. The floors and concrete are of embarrassing quality. I flip houses for a living and deal with contractors on a regular basis. Al is BY FAR the worst contractor I have ever dealt with. I recommend that if you meet with Al, do a better job than I did of researching him, once I ran into these issues I did a lot of searching online, and was horrified by what I saw. Don't make the mistake I made.