Having bought a house recently, we wanted to turn our family room into a home theater. After a lot of research on the net, I zeroed in on a projector and a 125" electric screen which would hang between the family room and the kitchen on demand. I also bought 5.1 speakers for the family rooms and 2 speakers for the patio (to be driven by a dual zone 7.1 receiver). At the same time, we also bought a 55" TV and sound-bar for the bedroom. It was now time to get all of this installed without any cables showing anywhere in the house. This was no small feet, because wires had to be run through the crawl space and the attic, and power had to be brought up to the roof for the projector and the screen. The resulting drywall holes had to be patched, textured and painted. We contacted a few places for quotes, Amm Tech being the last one among them. We found Andrew to be the most confident about the job, and he came up with a reasonable quote as well.
Just to give you an idea of how prompt and responsive Andrew is, he came in for the first visit on Wednesday, provided a quote on Thursday, ordered the material on Friday, began the work next Tuesday and was done by Wednesday afternoon!
Let me list all the pros I found in Andrew that made me give him all five stars:
1. Enthusiastic: Andrew loves what he does, and it was easy to see his enthusiasm for the work when he left after the first visit saying "this would be fun!". He works all kinds of odd hours and actually came to our place 7.30 in the morning on the second day of the job to get it wrapped up by the afternoon.
2. Punctual: Andrew is very particular about punctuality. If he gives you a time, he usually honors it to an amazing degree of precision. This is polar opposite of the experience I have had been several contractors in the bay area. Several of them forget to show up for an appointment!
3. Confident: The confidence shows in everything he does and the way he explains his work. If you ask for his opinion about something, he will either say he doesn't know or give you a very confident answer, which makes you feel at ease.
4. Skilled: He got almost everything done right in the first attempt. This meant no extra holes in the wall and no time wasted redoing things or adjusting positions of components already mounted.
5. Good Attitude: He takes the time to explain everything he is going to do and seeks input on everything that needs input. He also doesn't hesitate to go the extra mile if you ask him to do something above and beyond what you initially asked him to do. For example, I hadn't talked to him about rerouting the cable outlet in my house to a new location or running an extra HDMI cable through the crawl space for a possible TV location, but when I asked him to do those things later, he happily did it and only charged me for the cost of the cable. He is also very receptive to any kind of impromptu requests like hiding an entire surge protector behind the TV for accommodating my media streaming player and a homelink device.
Of course, no one is perfect, and there are a few things I found lacking in Andrew which he could improve on. I want to re-iterate that the pros strongly outweigh the cons (hence the five star rating), but I am just mentioning the cons for the sake of completeness. Firstly, he could be more careful about protecting the furniture and other stuff in the house against all the dust from drilling holes etc. We were left with a big dusting job after he was done. If you work with Andrew, just make sure you make your own arrangements for covering everything that needs to be covered. Secondly, I found his patching/texturing/painting work to be slightly lacking in quality - again nothing you can't fix later yourself. Unfortunately, he ended up using the wrong paint for the patches, so we had to repaint the patches with the right paint later. This was not completely his fault, because the two paints looked very similar (one was glossy and the other was flat), and we were the ones to provide him with the wrong paint. While he was painting, we were skeptical whether the paint was right, but he appeared very confident. Most likely patching/painting is not his core competence.
Finally, we have a beautiful home theater installation thanks to Andrew and we would definitely recommend him to anyone who wants to get home theater related work done. read more
