Reviews

We hired Robert to renovate a room in our home. After I got the original estimate from him, I immediately told him I wanted to move forward with the project. When he agreed to take the job, he told me he would start it in "about a month." When I followed up with him a few weeks later, he told me it would be an additional month before he could get to it. He was scheduled to start on April 18, but a day or two before he was scheduled to start, he notified me that he wouldn't be able to start until April 20. His timeline for the job was two weeks. But even the first day on the job, he only worked about 5 hours. He also told me that he couldn't work on Fridays, so he was only going to put in 4 days a week. This pattern continued with him working only a few hours on each day. The job stretched out and then he took a week off at the end of May. He finally declared the job done on June 3. After he left my home, I went in to take a closer look at the job. I found several problems that I hadn't noticed in the few brief moments I was able to check things out before he left. When I received his revised invoice (which was almost $1,100 higher than the original estimate and which I felt comfortable with so long as he corrected the myriad problems in the room). He did not want to fix those problems. He suggested I hire someone else to finish the job. He left the place dirty, tracked all kinds of construction mess through my house and did not clean it up. When he cut the holes for outlets he made them too big, he didn't put the boxes in the wall at the right depth and several of the outlets/switches and light fixtures are uneven on the wall. He ruined the pocket door by cutting the hole for the hardware too big & French doors did not seal correctly. Left scraps of material in my driveway. He is disorganized, messy and easily distracted. I would not recommend him for anything more complicated than installing a floor or other very simple projects.

The day that I started working at Mrs ******'s house she informed me that she was adding additional work to the project than what was previously discussed. These additional things made the project more difficult and would take a lot longer than the 2 weeks scheduled. Because the project was going to take longer and put me behind on my schedule, I informed her I wouldn't be able to work on Fridays as I would use that day to work on the projects I had already scheduled and that would allow me to take on the extra work she needed.
Mrs. ****** decided not to let me purchase the materials I needed but to buy them herself. She did not have the materials at the job site but asked for me to go to Home Depot and pick them up for her. She ended up calling in multiple orders on different days, so I ended up having to make several trips to the store for her. I had times where I had to sit and wait for 30-40 minutes for someone to bring the order, so on a lot of these days she says I didn't work enough hours for her she wasn't putting into consideration the time of me having to drive to the store and wait, to pick up stuff for her sometimes taking several hours of my time each day.
Mrs. ****** mentions that I took a week off, which I did as I already had a trip planned and paid for, the only reason this happened during her project was because the additional work she added made me go over the two weeks originally scheduled.
Also, I didn't realize until after I started the demo on this project that her and her husband had done all the previous work on the house themselves. I had a lot of uneven walls; things were not put together correctly which made this project difficult to do. Also, the fact that I would tell her the materials I needed, and she would give me things she had around the house or buy different sizes and would want me to make them work.
As far as the outlets I cut the drywall and some ended up being too big, but I was doing the drywall so all I had to do was mud it and it was no big deal and it was fixed.
The door that she talks about was a door that has been sitting outside for months and things were falling off because it had been sitting outside for so long and had nothing to do with me.
Before I even left for my trip Mrs ******'s Husband started to be very rude to me. It got so bad that I ended up walking off the project because of how disrespectful he was to me. When I got home that night Mrs. ****** wrote me a long email begging that I come back and that she would keep her husband away from me and that she was very sorry, but she understood if I didn't return. Against my better judgement and because she told me how much stress she was under having to deal with her husband, I decided to go back for her and complete the project.
When I completed the project, Mrs. ****** seemed happy, and I told her I would send her an invoice when I got home. The invoice was $,1,100.00 more than the original estimate but this included all the additional work and also included the dump fee for the extra demolition. The price I gave her for the original work stayed the same. She told me before she knew the price would be higher as excepted.
She emailed me the same night with a laundry list of stuff that she suddenly now was not happy with. I'm not sure if she was upset because I charged her for all the additional work and she was hoping I wouldn't charge her extra, but her email came off very rude and she was adding these minor things like me needing to come back to the location because I left the fan her husband let me borrow in the room I just finished and I needed to put it back in the living room where it belonged, or that there was a little dust on a screen that needed to be cleaned. She also wanted me to go back and sand and repaint a wall again because her husband added stuff to them after I was done with them. I have no problem doing touch ups and fixing things that customers are unhappy with, but it seemed she was going overboard with everything and with how her husband acted I could see that she wasn't going to stop and would continue adding stuff especially since she ended her email with, I will let you know what else we find wrong after my husband looks over it again.
I vacuumed and mopped and cleaned up the best I could before I left, In all the years ive been in business I've never had any issues or any complaints and I realized I wouldn't be able to make her happy with anything so I told her just to avoid any further issues I would take off $500.00 off the bill so she could pay her cleaning lady extra to clean the room how she likes it and that should cover anything else she wanted to be done. She agreed to this and said she would send me a check. The very next day after agreeing, she decided to write reviews and nasty comments all over the internet complaining about me. I would also mention that she refused to let me come pick up a check for the work I did, and I am still waiting for payment.

Mr, **** is making a lot of false statements about what happened. I did not add extra work the day he started the job. When he came to look at the job initially, I told him that when he started demolition, there might be additional things we find that need to be dealt with, which did eventually happen, but not on the day he started the job. The only part of the job that ended up being additional work, was that the floor was uneven and the plywood had to be taken up levelled before he could move on with the job. The unlevel floor/walls had nothing to do with the fact that my husband and I had worked on the house as we had not done anything in that room. So when he told me that he wasn't going to work on Friday's it was before the additional work came to light. We had agreed that I would buy the materials for the job before he gave me the estimate. I had purchased a lot of the materials prior to him starting the work and then I purchased additional materials that he requested immediately when he requested them. But he didn't give me a list all at once, so the multiple trips to ********** were not my fault, but I DID take into consideration the time it took for him to make those trips when I was keeping track of his time on the job. As to waiting for 30 to 40 minutes when he went to ********** for them to load the materials, he told me that he was going inside to get the order, not that he was doing curbside pickup. If he chose to spend extra time at ********** shopping for his other projects or his own desires, it was again, his choice. The door that was a problem had not been sitting outside and did not have "things falling off it." It had been stored in a dry location under roof and enclosed by walls. As to buying materials in different sizes than he asked for, it was simply a matter of ********** not have 8' 2 x 4's and my buying 10' 2 x 4's instead. That should not have caused any problem that I can think of. In fact, he had extra 2 x 4's left at the end of the job, so that wasn't an issue. Mr. **** said that I "seemed happy" with the work on the day he left. I didn't really get a chance to look at the job thoroughly before he took off. I did mention paint spots on the wood flooring and drywall mud on a couple of things, which he sort of cleaned up. But he was rushing to get out and thus, I did not get a chance to look over the job thoroughly until after he left. He was supposed to come back the next day to pick up his check, so I thought that I would wait until he got there and go over the problems that I saw upon closer inspection. When I got his increased invoice, he also said that he would not be there the next day, but would come by the day after to pick up his check. I was on a tight time line as I had people lined up to help me move my mother into that new room on Saturday and it was already Tuesday night when I heard from him. I was very concerned that he would not be able to correct the problems before my helpers came. That's why I sent him the list of things that needed to be done, so he could plan to be at my house early enough to get those problems corrected. The "fan" was in fact two fans, and the problem was not that they were left in the room, the problem was that when we loaned those fans to him to help keep him more comfortable while he was working, they had been clean. When he left they were covered in drywall mud, paint and dust. I asked him to clean them up. He left the floor in the room dusty and my porch, where he had thrown his debris during the work was covered in small pieces of wood, dirt, drywall chunks and dust, so I asked him to please clean that up.. The areas I asked him to sand and repaint were the door jam and window frame where my husband had filled some voids that Mr. **** had failed to fill and sand prior to painting them. The intent was that my husband was saving Mr. **** some time by doing what he should have done in the first place. After I sent him the first email, I did find additional problems with the room. When Mr. **** installed the pocket door, he failed to put in a stop to keep it from going all the way back in the wall, he didn't adjust the door so it would close all the way, and when he cut the hole for the hardware, he made it way too large. My husband (who is still recovering from a hip replacement he had only a couple of weeks ago) had to take the trim off the doorway, remove the door and we had to buy a new door and paint and rehang it before we could move my mother in. In additional, I had to fix scratches on the wood floor that Mr. **** made by being careless with his materials and tools, and there was additional filling and painting that had to be done to the wood work. In my original email to Mr. ****, I told him I was okay with the additional charge for the floor and extra dump fee. And I did mail him his check, on Friday, as I told him I would. Take care people - he is disorganize and makes a big mess.