Working with Danny was an absolute nightmare. He's an incompetent, deceitful contractor who wasted our time and money and brought so much unnecessary stress, complication and difficulty into our lives. It's hard to explain how badly he mismanaged our garage-ADU conversion and electrical projects, how much he misled us along the way or how many things he did wrongly.
We'll go into detail below, but his work across the board was poor, not up to code, incredibly slow, and in many cases had to be properly fixed by someone else after we fired Danny. We're now working with new electricians, plumbers, HVAC contractors and architects who are re-doing Danny's work after city inspectors told us that it was unacceptable. He failed numerous inspections from both DWP and Building and Safety.
Danny fails in almost every respect as a general contractor, and proved to be unprofessional, neglectful, dishonest, rude, combative, way in over his head, and unable to communicate even the simplest matters.
This is not just us saying that - several people involved in the garage conversion and electrical projects we undertook with DMI told us that our contractor did not know what he was talking about or doing, made countless careless mistakes, cut corners, and neglected to address corrections.
After we fired and replaced Danny, we realized how badly he had messed up and complicated the process, how much he lied to us along the way about his experience, and how many costly, amateur, avoidable mistakes he had made.
The details:
It took Danny 9 months, and he was still unable to finish a standard garage-ADU conversion project. Workers would not show up for days or even weeks at a time. Things that should have taken days took months. He left our property an absolute mess - trash strewn about and things not cleaned up for months.
When we asked Danny why his team wasn't working to finish the project, he'd yell at us, and then give us a rambling, incoherent, defensive answer. It was like dealing with a child. We would leave conversations more confused than when we entered: no one involved in this project could ever get any straightforward answers out of him.
Danny would tell us that he'd had conversations with DWP - but when we'd call the departments, representatives told us that these conversations had never taken place, or that Danny was just wrong.
Danny also threatened us - when we asked for documentation that a step was complete and up to code before sending payment for that step (this was after it had become clear that Danny couldn't be trusted and had botched many things along the way), Danny immediately threatened to put a lien on our house if payment wasn't made by end of day. We'd made all our payments on time up to that point.
And for the record - we made payment that day, and, of course, found out that the tasks we'd asked Danny to confirm he'd finished turned out to be incomplete.
Most recently, Danny assured us that our garage was ready for final inspection - but when the city inspector came, there were almost 20 (20!) outstanding corrections, some almost 2 months old, that Danny hadn't addressed. Danny said that we were at the 1 yard line, but when we spoke to the city, we learned we were far from it.
Phone conversations with Danny were incredibly frustrating - we could never get a straight answer from him, he would get very combative, and it was impossible for him to clearly explain what was happening. At one point, when I told him that DWP had said that his work was incomplete and inaccurate, he started screaming that he'd been secretly recording my phone conversations with him. Is that a way for a contractor to treat a client? When I told him that was illegal, he simply denied having ever said that.
His emails were impossible to understand, and he and his team would often contradict themselves in the same chain.
He lied to us many times over the course of the project, and on a basic level, told us that he had experience with HPOZ, DWP and Building and Safety - but as the project went on, it became clear that this was far from true. He made mistakes with these department at every step. He installed the wrong smoke detectors and A/C unit (violating city codes), without even knowing he was making a mistake, and shockingly told us that compliance forms from the city were invoices for things he'd bought.
He never itemized bills, expenses or invoices, and our requests to provide a simple rundown of what he'd completed was met with a firm, rude refusal from his team. This request couldn't have been more straightforward, but Danny and his team refused to document or detail their work.
And the quality of some of his work was poor - already, doors are sticking, windows don't open smoothly, caulking looks shabby.
An unbelievably terrible guy to deal with, someone to be avoided at absolutely all costs - we regret we didn't fire him earlier. read more