It would take hours to say everything that is wrong with this contractor. Why don't we start with this: when we came out to California to see the work he had done, he had done nothing, EXCEPT he and his workers had turned the water to the house off, left it off, and filled our two toilets with multiple bowel movements. So my partner came "home" to a house with two toilets FULL of dried feces which had been there for months. Believe it or not, it went downhill from there. The work was significantly below standard. Although we had paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars, he apparently used the money to finish other projects because when we got here, 12 months later, not much had been done and what had been done was done poorly. This is when he and his employees or subcontractors (he would never tell us which) began bullying us and terrorizing us. Example: we were sitting at the kitchen table and saw a mature manzanita bush in our front yard shaking. It was part of our landscaping. We ran outside to tell "Nathan", (Luke refused to tell us his last name when we told him we were going to file a police report) building a barbed wire fence across our front yard, which was not where we had walked it off with Luke. When we stopped him, he told us that if we went the way Luke and we had agreed on, "it would cost us more money." We told him that was between Luke and us, and that apparently made him so angry that he purposely drove his skid-steer right to the manzanita and knocked it down, AFTER we had told him we were saving it. Then he started down the hill to knock over a tree my partner was sawing branches off of. Finally the "fencing guy" signaled him to stop. I know that is unbelievable but it is true.
(The wood from the Manzanita was one of the few things they cleaned up, and quickly. Luke never even apologized for this one.)
We contacted Luke and told him to stop Nathan's path of destruction or we were calling Law Enforcement. Luke did talk to Nathan; I don't know what was said. As I wrote above, he refused to tell us Nathan's last name, and said if we contacted law enforcement, he would pack up everything and leave. He had so much of our money at that point that we felt like we had to give in. We told him that Nathan was never allowed on our property again, and unbelievably, Luke brought him back the next day. (We told him again that Nathan was not allowed here. he said he didn't know we felt that way, even after we told him what Nathan did and why he was not allowed there. Really?
Luke seemed to send us invoices when he needed money rather than when the work was finished. He called us regularly asking for more money and making promises he never kept. So as he was finishing up the fence (which he never did finish) I asked him if there were any other invoices. He refused to answer me. Then the first week of December, he sent three fraudulent invoices which he had backdated to September for work he had never done. Example: he had some leftover gravel from concrete work he had done at our house and he asked if he could put it in the driveway. We said "sure." There wasn't much; the driveway is still mostly mud but it was fine to dump what he had left over in our driveway. This invoice, a year later, was for $3200 -- for a little bit of gravel in the driveway which we never requested. Yes! All three invoices were like this.
There are stories after stories like this. The final kicker two days before Christmas. We had told him to always text before he showed up, because I am a professional who works at home via telehealth. We also put a sign on the door to that effect. Two days before Christmas, while I was in a Zoom call, he began banging on the door and would not stop. I finally went to the door and told him I was not available as the sign said and closed the door. He took this opportunity to pack up everything and leave. The fence -- his final project -- was not finished. The. day after Christmas he texted us and said he was coming to the house to "get paid." According to our records, he actually owed us money, and we told him so. He had not finished the last project, he had not paid us for the damage he and his crew had done to our property, (not mentioned in this already lengthy review) and other than the three fraudulent invoices, he did not send us any invoices that we owed him money for. So we told him not to come. That very day, the day after Christmas, he filed a mechanics lien on the house, then said if we did not negotiate with him he would charge us even more.
I could go on and on and on. I can't believe he is even in business. I'm pretty sure he won't be for long. read more
