I have to share my experience and tell you how disappointed I am in KC Arnold's unkept promises…read more
He came to us with his bid and design for a pool in our new house's backyard in June of 2020 and promised the world. I suppose hearing his stories of the "big guys" and how you're just a number to them and how they sign you up only to quit working at the earliest forecast of rain, etc. worked on me. I believed him when he told us that we would be swimming before the summer ends. I believed him when he told us that he would be done within 5 weeks of starting our pool.
I will give him this--he is a great salesman. He regaled us with tales of all of his previous pool work and showed us pictures of his happy customers. From the first time we met with him I responded to his energy--even when he had bad news about the schedule and summer began to slip away, we still believed in his enthusiasm for the pool. Unfortunately, he came up with excuse after excuse to put off the construction of our pool.
Please understand that we were willing to cut him plenty of slack for the toll that COVID took on his sub-contractors' crews over the summer. But the only time KC ever took action is when we threatened to stop paying him. He told us that we were next in line for gunite for over 3 months. Amazingly, when we told him on a Friday that we were going to select another contractor, the load of gunite appeared the following Monday!
He began digging the pool in early September, finally applying the gunite to create the inside of the pool in October. In late October my wife and KC discussed how small the deck area around the pool looked as compared to the design we had seen (in the bid, he promised 1,024 sq. ft. of concrete deck, but it was significantly less than that when he prepped the area around the pool). My wife told him, "If you can forward me the email that you sent regarding our final plans, and this is something we glanced over, then we will pay for half of the cost for additional concrete." Unfortunately, he never emailed us the "final design;" it was sent for the first time to us that night. We called and told him this, and he replied that he would pay for his mistake (!), but (speaking over us to his wife), "I'm not giving them a warranty or a spray deck...nothing! I'm done!" Then, he hung up the phone on us! He apologized the next week for his actions, and finally "finished" the pool on November 1 (which still wasn't totally finished, btw). He told me that if he didn't get his final payment the next day, then "you'll see me blow a gasket, and you don't want that."
However, there were significant issues pointed out to me by more than one of the pool cleaning companies we interviewed that made me embarrassed to admit how much we paid for our pool from KC. For instance, he added a second pump for the water features which, I have since been told, was redundant for a smaller 16K gallon pool. (The single pump is enough to work for a pool twice our size, water features included). But because it pulls the dirty water from the bigger pump, it will require cleaning every 1-1 1/2 months instead of the normal 4-6 months that filters require to avoid mold. And it pads the bid for the pool contractor.
Since getting a pool is such a significant investment (for us, anyway LOL), we don't like hearing other pool contractors making bids here in our neighborhood telling us that we should have paid significantly less than we did for what we got. KC charged us at least 20% more than other companies we have since seen. I know, I know, we signed the contract at the price we paid and can't change that now. But I can tell you that it shouldn't happen again to you now that you know what has happened to us. If I could go back in time, I would not have believed all of KC's promises...and likely saved some money, too.