Do NOT hire this man! Please read the full review which is continued in the pictures below…read more
We hired Tracy back in June 2022 to complete several home projects on our newly purchased home. We did not live there while this work was being completed, since it was an extensive home remodel. We planned to replace all floors, kitchen cabinets, bathroom vanities, paint all walls & ceilings, & tile the master bathroom shower in our 4000 SQF home. Tracy seemed knowledgeable when my husband hired him. He stated he was a level 12 carpenter. To this day, nobody we have talked to knows what on earth a level 12 contractor is, so it doesn't mean anything. He also lists his business as an LLC. I searched everywhere including the Missouri Secretary of State website, and they have no record of Tracy's LLC. He states he is an LLC but isn't.
The first red flag we encountered is Tracy requires a 50% deposit. Any good company doesn't require more than 1/3 down, so we screwed ourselves there first. Tracy had 4 workers his first week helping to demo everything, & it all was going very fast. After the first week, he couldn't keep any employees. Work started to slow. He never arrived at our house at a consistent time. I would go over to the house almost every day & would know if he had been there or not. Sometimes there would be days where nothing had been done at all. No communication or anything with us. At one point, his phone got turned off and we couldn't get a hold of him. After he got a new phone, he wouldn't respond to any of our texts & would then tell us he never received them.
Tracy uses an online invoice system. I saved every invoice he sent us. When he would make a change, it would automatically send an email. I started comparing new invoices he would send us to the original invoice, & he would add on charges or increase prices without ever discussing them with us. He would do this late at night mostly, & we brought this up to him several times, emailed him, texted him, & he would just ignore those. He tried charging us his own personal Federal & State taxes which is not allowed in the state of Missouri. My husband finally had to discuss this with him in person, make him write everything down that needed to be changed, & he still didn't correct it. The final straw was when he stated he corrected all the invoices we asked, but he added on a million different charges to make up for those we wanted him to remove. Petty stuff too such as installation of toilet paper holders & towel rings. He charged us an extra $30 for a new waterline on the toilets he already charged us $300 for. Every little thing you could think of was an extra charge for Tracy. He spent money faster than you could blink. Toward the end right before we fired him, he tried telling us to pay him for the completion of the master shower tile & trim installation before it was actually completed. My husband said he wasn't paying Tracy until it was actually done, & Tracy said he didn't have enough money to pay his workers. He then fired his workers that same day, because we weren't going to give him any money. In total, we paid Tracy $53,000. How he blew through all that money was beyond us when the amount of materials he actually spent was nothing even close to that. He charged us way over for some items & couldn't keep anything straight. In total, we only owed Tracy $6,000 left for him to complete everything in our house because of how much he continued to ask for. Essentially, we gave him advances on all of the work. In Tracy's eyes, we still owed him probably $60,000 more, because he would just continue adding more to our bill so that he could receive more money from us.
My husband made a surprise visit one day & caught one of Tracy's employees smoking in our kitchen with new paint & flooring. That should have been the final straw and fired Tracy, but we thought it wouldn't happen again. We were wrong. We also found a bucket of over 20 small bottles of whiskey that Tracy drank throughout his time at our home. It was clear Tracy had no idea what he was doing in the work he did complete. There are horrible cuts of the LVP floor he installed. Some boards are popping up off the ground. He did not remove the old floor's stair nose and put new flooring over it. He Paint is all over the ceiling, outlets, & old paint is still bleeding through because he didn't do enough coats. We had to hire a new painter to fix his mess, and what a horror that was. Tracy told us he was using Behr paint in a light gray shade. This is the color I gave to our new painter to use. We quickly found out that is not what Tracy used. Tracy used the cheapest Sherwin Williams paint you could find. The painter said he would never recommend that paint for anyone's house because of how low quality it is. Tracy charged us $15,000 to paint our entire house including the ceilings, and he didn't paint one ceiling. He lied to us.
