My husband and I hired Wayan Asefi aka Wayne Asefi of Bay Area Kitchen and Bath (formerly Pro Builders Construction) in March of 2017 so this review is 2.5 years in the making. Before I move forward with the review, let me firmly state that it is Wayan Asefi that I worked with. I only met Tariq (Eric) Aslami once at the beginning of the project. We hired Wayan after confirming his builder's permit #959734 was active and in his name. Three months later we discovered that the permit had changed in name to Tariq Aslami, but Wayan assured us that he was partners with Tariq and that for professional reasons Tariq had taken over as primary name holder. He also changed his business name from Pro Builders Construction and was now working under Bay Area Kitchen and Bath. At that time he issued us an updated contract in that the new name, the header of which I have attached to this review so there is no confusion.
Wayan was hired to remodel our entire home. From the very beginning there were warning signs. He asked for a 40k deposit, which as it turns out is illegal. A contractor can ask for no more than 1000 dollars or 10%, whichever is less at the start of a project. He was supposed to pull permits for the entire house but kept telling us he preferred to pull them one room at a time. In the meantime he would busy his crew with demo'ing the walls, floors, electric, plumbing, windows and fixtures. He told us he could do the demo while waiting for permit approval. This proved to be untrue. He never pulled a single permit. But he had a photo of the permit office! (Yeah, I know. We were suckers). Over time he demo'd every room in our house , all or in part, leaving us only our dining room as a makeshift bedroom and a small bathroom. We lived that way for the next 1.5 years.
Wayan consistently had excuses for asking for money. Demo was costing more than expected, he wanted to get started with additional rooms, he needed to install expensive beams, etc. But his biggest excuse was that he needed it to purchase the hard materials. Tubs, fixtures,kitchen and bath cabinetry, tile, wood flooring, doors, appliances, etc. He would produce photos of each item and claim they were on order. He would get cagey, however, whenever we asked for receipts. The only receipts he ever handed us were for our kitchen cabinets (which we later found out he had marked up 3x wholesale) and a concrete patio that he marked up more than double.
As time passed by, most days with no crew at all and our anxiety increasing, Wayan got more and more evasive about why we were not getting our now extremely torn up house rebuilt and why the many products he said were on order were not arriving. Drywall continued to be pulled from walls and shoddy and illegal electric and plumbing were installed (none of which were done by permit. The city later required it all be removed and redone). He began to install stucco to exterior walls which we found later was not done to code. It all had to be pulled and replaced. We believe he chose projects he could do inexpensively and flashily to disguise the fact that he had spent most of our money, and to keep us from asking too many questions. The whole debacle came to a head five months later when we finally caught Wayan in a lie with regards to a french door we had ordered together from Home Depot. It turns out the very next day Wayan had returned to Home Depot and canceled the order. We had waited 2.5 months at that point for the door and had nothing protecting us from the impending winter where the door was to go except a thin piece of temporary wallboard. We got confirmation of the cancellation while Wayan was sitting with us in our home. He could no longer wriggle out of his lies.
What ensued was a confession from Wayan which we have in writing and on video tape that he had misspent our money and could not finished the project and an agreement that he would repay us. By the time he left our project, with our home in shambles, we were out over 150,000 dollars and had additional debts to the architect, engineer, plumber, and electrician, all of whom he stiffed on their contracts.
We have now spent 2 years trying to recover our money from Wayan. To date we have only recovered 15:000. It is the worst nightmare we have ever lived through and will cost us for the rest of our lives. Literally cost us. Our 150k reno ended up costing us 300k because we had to start from scratch with a new contractor. Each inspector, contractor, engineer and planner who came through our house told us the same thing: that it was the worst case of contractor fraud they had ever seen. With all my heart I wish we had never met this man and I implore anybody reading this to think twice before doing any kind of business with him. You are likely to never see your money again. read more