This is a difficult review for me to write. I would rather celebrate businesses and look on the…read morebright side, but I hope that by writing this review, consumers can be educated and this business can improve.
My husband and I reached out to Scott Of All Trades after a tree fell down in our backyard during a summer storm. The tree took out part of our fence and fell on power lines, pulling the power pole and lines off of our home and siding and trim along with it.
I had heard good things about Scott Of All Trades from its reviews and friends who had worked with them. And considering we have a 100-year-old house in the Highlands, having a great handyman available for odd jobs would be extraordinarily helpful.
So we made an appointment, and Scott, of Scott Of All Trades, came out to the house to survey the damage and work we needed done. He, my husband and I talked about how the vinyl siding needed to be replaced along with the wooden sheathing, wooden siding and foam insulation board behind it. The corner trim piece needed to be fixed. While Scott was here, we could use the deck stairs being reinforced. And when the power came off the house, the pole fell on our side gate. Scott pointed out that the gate wasn't made correctly to begin with and would hang better if it was repaired and the brackets assembled correctly.
After this meeting, we felt confident about working with Scott Of All Trades, and he had several jobs to work on -- not even getting to the fence yet.
He gave us a fair quote and came back to make the repairs. The work took him a few hours.
But when we inspected the siding work closer, it became apparent that he put up the vinyl siding but nothing behind it -- no wooden sheathing, wooden siding or foam insulation board. You could push on the siding and see that it was hollow behind it. There was nothing between the vinyl siding and the back of the lathe from our plaster walls.
He matched the color of the new siding to the old, and his work reinforcing the stairs looked great.
But the gate was not reassembled like we had originally discussed. The brackets were still hung wrong. It looked like he just replaced the broken slats.
So we contacted him, and told him that we weren't happy with the work. Regarding the gate, he replied the estimate was to fix the gate, not rebuild it, and along with replacing the broken slats he adjusted it to hang better. But it was more of less in working order beforehand, and we would not have agreed to pay to fix it had Scott not originally pointed out how badly built it was in the first place. At this point, we offered to pay for the deck reinforcement and materials; if he wanted the rest, he needed to come back and do the work as it was originally discussed and decided on.
We paid the adjusted amount, and he agreed to come back.
On his subsequent visit, he was at the house for a couple of hours, fixed the siding and took another crack at the gate. He asked me to inspect after he was done, and it looked good to me. But after he left, we opened the gate to find that it now hits and rubs up against the corner of the house -- the corner trim he fixed on his previous visit. I take some of the blame for not testing how the gate closed when he was at the house, but he closed the gate before he left; he knew it hit the house. He fixed what he could and left it, not telling us that more work will need to be done so that the gate doesn't rub up against the corner.
And then following this visit, he contacted us several times asking for our payment, starting with a day or two after his last visit. Typically contractors have given a payment due date of two to four weeks out from the repairs. We definitely want to pay for what we owe -- assuming the work is done well -- so we dropped a check in the mail roughly a week after the work had been done. The check had still not reached him a few days later. He texted us his address; it had recently been changed. To the best of our knowledge, we sent it to the right address, but it would have been helpful to have gotten an updated invoice with the remaining total and new address clearly written on it.
And if we had been offered the ability to pay by credit card from the get-go, waiting for the payment would not have been an issue.
He pushed to pick the check up via our mailbox the following day, and we ended up having to cancel the check. (Thankfully our bank waived the $35 fee.) I texted him about the issue of the gate hitting the house, and he said he would look at it when he picked up the check.
I was passing through the first floor when I saw him arrive, and I walked toward the front door to greet him when I saw him walk up the steps, grab the check and walk back down, not looking at the gate once.
Scott Of All Trades was given repeated chances and did not strike us as professional. The whole experience felt like a series of headaches. The work took too long to be completed. The handyman search continues.
