Red flags ignored. Ended up with footing for masonry wall that was 9 inches out of level, sloppy,…read moreand inadequate to safely support the load. Cost me dearly. Read on for details.
I called Todd to build a cement block wall based on a recommendation from a neighbor. He was responsive at first and started quickly, but to my detriment I ignored a few red flags, including dodging my direct question before signing about the footing depth by telling me to read the testimonials on the website. I don't think Todd has ever done masonry. He seems to be a shrewd business person who connects customers to subcontractors without holding them to any uniform standard.
The footing for this 57-foot long, 8-foot high wall was excavated and poured in a single day. It was 9 inches (yes, 9!!) out of level, not stepped but following the grade of the lot, and sloppy. When I confronted, Todd referred me to the heads of the crew. With some language barriers, they described only minor adjustments to "level" each block. They must have planned to lay them in snaky courses, either hoping the stucco would hide their sloppy work or not even having that much of a plan. Keep in mind we are talking about isometric, rectangular cement block, not natural stone.
Furthermore, the footing was only 12 inches wide and went about 11 inches below grade to support a straight, heavy, 8-foot tall wall. I believe that I prevented a catastrophic failure down the road by cancelling the whole project. I'm out $6600 for the footing alone, as that was the best offer I got from Todd to cancel the whole thing. Now have a cedar fence where my sound wall was intended to go, after paying to core into the footing to set posts.
To his credit, Todd did offer to demo the footing and start over. I was afraid to go forward with that approach for a host of reasons. It was going to be disruptive, damaging to my property, and time-consuming, all to the end of letting the same crew that screwed it up in the first place have another go at it. Sometimes you just have to suck up the sunk cost and move on.
My biggest mistake by far on this project was hiring Austin Stucco and Masonry.
I took a video of the footing against a level line, but Yelp is no longer allowing videos, so these snapshots are taken from the video and are not as clear as they would be otherwise.