I hired this company to redo a shower stall. Because they were already going to be doing concrete work in the shower stall, I pointed out two, small, hand-sized areas of concrete that needed patching on my balcony. The owner Chris, said he would not charge me because it was negligible. I was happy that they were a good faith company who wouldn't nickel and dime me. Boy, I turned out to be wrong on that!
Their work in the shower was just alright. It required a second pass to fix some lines that were not quite straight and they offered to fix it. The shower was substantially less work than initially scoped. The estimate was for a much larger job than needed to be done to fix the shower. I expected to get a discount on the initial estimate. Chris discounted me $200. I agree to pay him the full estimate minus $200 for services not rendered in the initial estimate.
After the job is complete, Chris suddenly springs me with an additional charge of $100. He wants to charge me for the balcony patches, which were two child's hand-sized areas. This was quite irritating because not only did they not have to do as much of a job on the shower as they initially thought, but he was going to flip-flop on his initial word that he wouldn't charge me for patching the balcony concrete.
He began harassing me via e-mail, using adjectives like "ridiculous" and questioning my character. This was extremely unprofessional and uncalled for. Within a couple of emails he began threatening to take out a lien on my property. That sounded odd to me, like he was bullying and on an anger trip rather than negotiating like a regular contractor. A lien on my property for a dispute over $100? Sounded unreasonable.
I would have gladly paid the $100 if he had been honest with the charge up-front, or if he had sent me a change order in writing saying that the balcony patching would take more effort and he wanted to charge for the balcony. It was neither. The patches were tiny and he did much less work in the shower than he initially expected to have to do. It seemed like he was extorting me for additional money after the work was complete because he felt he could get away with threatening me, or because he didn't really like the fact that he had to do a second pass on the shower floor to get it right.
I began talking to my condo building manager about this contractor. I learned that he fired one of his workers who was known for doing outstanding work on bathrooms, then threatened him physically if he ever worked on remodeling any of our building units. In short, this guy is trouble. Like the other reviewer also noted, he changes price quotes in the middle of a job or after the job is done, and gets nasty and short-tempered.
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