Avoid Avoid Avoid. At all costs, AVOID…read more
Throughout the course of my house renovations, I was lucky enough to come up with contractor after contractor that was trustworthy, meticulous, with pride in their work, and an 'over and above' attitude to work with me on achieving the best results. Unfortunately, the absolute opposite is true of this guy.
To go through the entire list of awfulness would take years, but allow me to point out the main crimes to humanity & my house!
- He could not work with our builder at all. Despite months and months of contractors coming through the house working on various aspects, this guy had to be left in the house entirely on his own, or he'd refuse to work at all.
- He frequently turned up half way through the day and left after a few hours.
- After 5 days in the house, I went along to inspect what he'd done. He'd painted one layer throughout the house, and in the process destroyed everything in his path. The months and months of meticulous craftsmanship that had been put in by other contractors was being slowly destroyed by him. He dropped white wall paint ALL OVER my new solid wooden floors. He painted new paint over the years and years of chipped off paint on the window sills, rather than sanding them down. He dropped varnish from the stairs on the white quartz kitchen worktops. He varnished OVER the dust on the brand new solid wood stairs.
- I took him off the job immediately, and refused to pay him the second half of his charge unless he corrected all the damage. He refused to do any more work or fix any of it until I paid him the rest of this money. Of course this wasn't something I was going to do in a hurry! So he downed tools and I asked him to drop his key back. He in turn threatened to bring me to the small claims court for not paying him his dues.
- I then had to spend another week trying to fix the damage he'd done, and repaint myself. Actually it was impossible to fix, and there is still paint on the floor and varnish on the countertop. I had to put in hours of work re-sanding the beautiful stairs which is just about ok now.
Now comes the kicker. Despite my being completely reasonable, and giving him the option to come back and fix what he'd wrecked, finish the job, and finally get paid, this guy obviously thought he had been extremely hard done by.
So, before he dropped back the key through the letter box when I wasn't around, he let himself into the house, took off all the backboards under the kichen units and pulled out the fridge, and sprinkled prawns all underneath. He then put everything back to the way it was, and walked out. After I moved in, it took a good week of putting up with this mystery smell before I finally found the cause. I can't tell you how upsetting it is to move into a house after nearly a year of hard graft, to have to face issues like this. Disgusting behaviour by a man old enough to know better, and I'd like to do everything in my power to make sure no one else makes the same mistake that I did by hiring him.
Avoid avoid avoid, run in the other direction if you get a quote by this loonybin.
