Maybe the worst experience of my life. My wife and I were put through absolute hell. The gross incompetence, lack of work ethic and constant fraudulent behavior/deception by the owner was an absolute nightmare!! Despite several reputable general contractors advising us that his work was atrocious, we went with him anyways because he was the low bidder. We figured our job was easy enough and that the owner has been doing this work for so long, how bad could it be? What a mistake. He cost us tens of thousands of dollars in payments to other contractors to fix his work.
Greencrete didn't even get 1/3 through the job when they reached their deadline to complete the job. His workers (a crew of old senior citizens, recovering and current alcoholics) would show up sporadically and do minimal work. I never saw a full crew report and work a full day. We ended up firing Richard Crosby, telling him to finish the work he started and then leave. If it wasn't for myself constantly checking his work, I'd have walls without footings beneath them because their forms were drastically off from where they should have been. The owner doesn't even understand the basics of how to lay out a foundation and/or is too lazy to actually do the work the right way.
The owner intentionally sets up his contracts to collect as much payment as he can before a work task actually starts. He'll then prematurely start subsequent tasks (before finishing the initial tasks) in order to collect the next dispursement of funds, thereby leveraging himself so that you can't fire him without having to try and reclaim paid costs. Once he collects as much money as he can from you, he'll start slamming you with insane costs out of nowhere that were never discussed or agreed upon.
During our job, he claimed that his concrete supplier went up on his costs, so he invoiced us for it, claiming it was our responsibility...even though we had a fixed price contract. Furthermore the price increase he was claiming predated our contract. He never agreed that the charge was unjustified.
When we encountered rock, he told us in writing he'll charge us $200/hour for an excavator "to operate" and $250/hr for a hammer "to operate". We logged all their operating hours from our camera. When we pointed out that he double charged us for hours that each machine was operating...He stated that a machine sitting idle with no one operating it counts as billable operating hours for that machine. He said that whether he staffs the machine with an operator or not, we still have to pay an hourly operating rate for an unmanned machine sitting dead on the property.
Also, he cracked a basement window he put in and had the nerve to tell us its not his responsibility to fix the window that he broke.
The owner is so incompetent that it took him 4 attempts to estimate the amount of concrete he needed for a series of simple rectangular footings. Each time he had to reorder concrete.
These are just a couple among endless examples. We ended up paying this guy extra money just to get him off our property.
During the job, we saw the owner's name in the Branford paper for an assault arrest. We obtained the Police report and found out that he showed up at his ex wife's place and allegedly punched some guy in the face that she was seeing. He then denied it to the cops, but said he threatened to run him over with a dump truck. The owner is a low life. He has a long, litigious court history and is always being sued. The guy is broke and will do anything to try and defraud you. Do your research before considering him for any work!!! read more
