BUYER BEWARE: Do not work with this contractor. You will likely spend more than you anticipated for work that is not done correctly. He does not send out a detailed contract before working with clients. This puts not only the clients but himself at risk. When we stated we did not feel comfortable continuing to work with him and asked for a refund, he refused and said he didn't need to since we wouldn't be working with him again.
The property manager for my home brought Chris in to replace the front walkway and redo the stairs into the home. He refused to send me an invoice until the first payments were made--which needed to happen via Zelle and/or Venmo, in my instance I had to do both over multiple payments to get it to work. I wish I would have taken this as a sign NOT to work with him, but I didn't and that is ultimately a $14K mistake that I have to live with.
He was told multiple times that we wanted a thin walkway/to keep the look and feel of the original design. However when trying to choose material he informed us that he would need to go wider to accommodate a certain border. We chose NOT to do that border, but he made our walkway significantly wider anyway. The design layout/his artistic vision did not look like what we initially discussed. We had to ask him to remove/return the material and go back to the original design that we had before demo. And he said to make the walkway thinner and we'd just have to fix it with sod in the spring.
He puts in the walkway, and the bricks/spacing is not consistent but it was acceptable. Until we walk on it and notice that bricks are shifting and it feels unstable. Chris told us that it will "settle"--however multiple construction contacts tell us that it's not done well and when we brought up our concerns to Chris, he said he'll take care of it. (Update we can STILL pull up bricks with our bare hands--confirming that not only is it unsafe, it's poorly constructed). After telling us it was fine to use, he said he would come back and fit it in the Spring. Given the experience, lack of detailed planning/communication and complexity/uncertainty around payments, I do not feel comfortable having Chris come back to fix the walkway. I asked for a refund to cover the cost of getting it redone in the Spring, and he said he had no obligation to do so because we aren't continuing to work with him. I told him that ultimately, the impact of a negative review could cost him more money in the long run than providing the refund and I guess we will see if that proves to be true or not.
Then, we get to the front steps. He told us on numerous occasions that "the steps will look exactly the same" and that he can get the same brick we originally had. Demo day shows up and he tells us that he called around and can't find the brick that we currently have--which I would assume could have been ordered if he had sourced proactively, but at this point, we were already behind our project timeline. We find a solution and the project is pretty much done and then we realize--he completely omitted the larger landing we had at the top of the stairs/the door can't be opened if someone is standing there, and the original railings he said we could repurpose in the concepting phase would cost an additional $2k to replace due to the new dimensions he created. When bringing up our concerns, Chris blamed us because we approved it. Despite repeatedly letting him know that we don't know anything about construction--and that we had told him it looked nice because it did--it WAS NOT functional, and as the "professional" he should be striving for form as well as function. When we asked how it could be fixed, he said we could just combine the front step with the second making it 12 inches high, twice the depth of all the other steps, which are 6 inches. We pointed out that that's a hazard and not up to code. Eventually he says he would redo the project for another $2k.
The end result of his "redo" is that the finished product looks shoddily done and is not symmetrical. Concrete is slapped on all of our bricks and we got confirmation by another professional we brought in following the conclusion of this project, who informed us that this will be very difficult to get off because of how thick Chris laid it on, which will cost me more in the long run.
Given his responses to negative review from others, I have no doubt that he will try and refute these claims, state that we weren't clear, etc--but as a business owner who failed to send out a design comp, an invoice until he was paid, and gave us little to no documentation about the details of this project, I am at a loss as to how people without a construction background could possibly be expected to do better. We hired what we thought was an expert for a reason--and it cost us time and money that we won't get back. read more