We closed on our home in November of 2021. Stanley, the owner of Global Home Improvements came in at a affordable price (for us) and was personable and enthusiastic about the job.
The work to be done was extensive. 3 bathroom remodels, basement finishing with a theater room, recessed lighting throughout the house, paint, baseboards and casing, galvanized piping replacement, some windows, new stairway railing, and a number of other smaller tasks.
But, at the outset, Stanley said that the work would be done in 3 months. Demolition began at the end of January/beginning of February. We didn't move in until the middle of October, and even then the house was not fully done. It still isn't.
Over the course of the project Stanley ran into labor issues and rising material costs. He started pushing back his completion date and asking for money ahead of schedule (according to our contract) We were assured at the beginning that Stanley had a group of 12 guys that could be working on our project. As it turned out, at no point did he ever have more than 2 guys assigned to the work on a consistent basis.
He would constantly ask me to remind him what was in the contract, or which e-mail I'd sent to him about project details.
We had new bedroom doors specified in the contract, and Stanley had requested for us to send him what we wanted him to buy. In the end, we sent him exactly what we were going to buy, then made the order ourselves. He picked up the doors, took them to the house, then later complained that it was more work to finish and paint the doors than anticipated and that he wanted to charge us more on labor, because we "should have bought pre-primed doors." He ended up letting it go after we reminded him we had sent him the doors we were going to buy, and that he hadn't said anything.
By August, we had had enough. In exchange for a money advance, we had Stanley agree to complete the project by September 07. While the workmanship up to that point had been quite fair, it dropped off a cliff once the project was on a real deadline, especially patching and painting. Take a walk around my house and I can point out any number of paint mistakes, bad lines, really really excessive caulk beads, completely unpatched holes for electrical sockets, large patched areas that were left unsanded but then painted over, paint runs, cracks, etc. We had purchased some expensive Saltillo tiles for a bathroom floor, and during the install the workers introduced a grout haze, paint, and oils into the tiles, then sealed the floor. We had to spend nearly $1000 hiring an expert to come mitigate the damage and even then the floor will never look new.
Near the end, getting Stanley to do anything that required spending his own money was like squeezing water from a rock. He would complain constantly about how expensive things were and the "extra work" his guys had to do. The arrangement became such that we were purchasing construction materials for him and deducting it from the overall contract amount.
There were so many things Stanley could have done to save himself time and money and he elected to do something else instead. For instance, he let his guys who were inexperienced with modern style stair railings take two weeks to educate themselves on the subject and complete the work, rather than subcontracting it out to someone who could have done it in a few days. And now my railings are crooked.
We found out that the windows that he'd ordered and installed were not up to code due to a high U factor of 0.44. Yet, in the State of Illinois, residential windows must be rated at 0.30 or lower in new construction, and I pointed that out to him in my city code.
So what's left to do? Window pane replacements to get them to code, a missing hand rail for the stairs going to the basement, and missing basement circuits, and probably some other stuff that I have yet to discover. At this point, after all our haranguing for him to finish the job, Stanley has apparently decided to ghost us after taking one last payment (that we didn't contractually owe him). It must be that the rest of the money isn't worth the remaining work.
You might read all of this and think Stanley is a bad guy. He's not. And you'll find that he has plenty of 5-star reviews. But I really didn't like being put into the position where I felt like if we didn't dangle a money carrot over his head, he wouldn't finish the job. Unfortunately, the work is still not finished and evidently won't be.
If you are considering Global Home Improvements, think hard about the size and scope of your project, and whether you'll be okay taking on the GC role yourself when **** hits the fan, because that is what we ended up having to do. I really wanted things to work out. But, this experience was incredibly disappointing, especially at the end. Last year we started the business relationship with Stanley with so much promise; but it has ended on a very sour note. read more