After having water from the condominium unit above ours come into our living room ceiling, my insurance company's referral service recommended Spectrum. Spectrum did the repair estimate and we chose them to also do the repair work.
We needed some ceiling drywall replaced (with all that's involved with that including mudding, taping, texturing, priming, and painting), as well as painting of the adjacent walls that were affected by the removed/replaced ceiling material.
The first worker sent out arrived not even knowing what kind of work he was going to do. He didn't even have a ladder. He went to a local big box store to buy drywall and other materials he needed.
The quality of his work was horrible. After several days I let Spectrum know about my concerns and a Project Manager came out and talked him through what he was doing wrong, and the PM convinced me to let him continue.
After several more days I let Spectrum know that he wasn't getting any better and told them to replace him with someone who could do the work properly.
The replacement worker did an ok job with finishing up the drywall work, but didn't check all of the bad tape work done by the original guy, eventually leaving us with a tape bubble and two other poorly patched and textured areas.
The replacement worker also did the priming and painting of the ceiling and walls. Long story short, his painting skills were poor, with many areas poorly covered, ceiling paint from the roller on the walls, and about half of the cut-in painting not done at all.
At that point we had enough. After three weeks of work to fix and paint about 210 square feet of ceiling, we told Spectrum we were through with them. We didn't want them to send anyone else out to fix it because we now had no confidence that they could find anyone to do the painting properly. We repainted the entire room ourselves, and our "amateur" painting quality far exceeded the quality of the "professional" painting done by Spectrum.
From a customer-service point of view they weren't bad, but in retrospect, when eight of 14 emails from the Project Manager over about 80 days contain apologies ("Apologies, I forgot we are all off on Monday", "Apologies on the confusion", "Apologies.", "Apologies for any inconvenience", "I wanted to reach out and apologize for this", "I do apologize that your experience with Spectrum was not as expected", "We do apologize for any language barriers", "Apologies for the delayed reply."), it's a bad sign. The two Project Managers I dealt with often contradicted each other in replies to the same issue.
My gauge for whether or not I got good quality work from a service provider is this: If I can do as well (or poorly) as the service provided did, then I should have just done the work myself. In this case I have no doubt that my amateur drywall and painting skills would have been better than the "professional" work performed by Spectrum.
This contractor will never get any work from me, of any kind, in the future. read more