If you are considering hiring Mary Pat Speck of Artistic Tough Interiors as your designer, RUN! She has no integrity and tries to steal from her clients. She works with Rob Parish, a "GC" who is unlicensed who she uses for all of her jobs, so that puts you and your home at risk since he is not insured.
We had a horrible experience, where the bills went up and up and up. When we confronted her and paused the project, she had so many lies as to why the bills were getting to be so expensive. For one example, the demo subcontractors charged $2,000, and Mary Pat and her unlicensed GC, Rob Parish, tried to charge us $5,500. We said that could not be right, and she claimed it was expensive because of the "workman's comp insurance, health insurance, truck fees." She expected us to believe that subcontractors bill for healthcare insurance. When the subcontractors found out what her and Rob were trying to do, they said they would never work for them again.
It gets better! We gave her money for deposits for materials, which she paid the stores a deposit. When we paused the project, she tried to get our deposits from the stores refunded to her credit card! She never even told us that she was trying to get all of that money back! She was trying to steal our money that was supposed to be used to pay the stores for our project's materials! We had to find this out by calling the stores ourselves. Thankfully, the stores had integrity, unlike Mary Pat, and they did not give her the money back.
Mary Pat's designs are also dated. She is stuck designing homes from over 20 years ago. She took us into stores to show us materials, they were all ugly and outdated. The employees literally laughed and told us when she left that her choices were dated.
We only hired her because she came recommended from Freestyle Interiors. There were so many red flags, such as no pictures of her past work, no website, no reviews, nothing. We trusted Freestyle Interiors and moved forward. It was also tough to find available contractors then as well.
When we were trying to settle things up to move our separate ways, Mary Pat kept coming up with new bills to try to get thousands more from us. When we didn't fall for the "revised bills", magically, a new bill would show up for something else. We didn't fall for any of her tricks.
Thankfully we stopped the project when we did, figured out what she was doing, and fired her and Rob. If we didn't get on top of it when we did, we would have overpaid by tens of thousands. How Mary Pat operates is she gives you "estimates" and not actual prices. So when she gives you a final bill, it is much higher than her "estimate." We did not fall for any of her tricks. Don't fall for any of them either, or do yourself a favor and don't put yourself in that situation by not hiring her. You will save a lot of money, time, and headaches. It is time for her to retire and stop screwing people. read more