Why write this?
I needed to write this review because I think what we went
through was quite amazing. Talking with
people, it seems that remodeling is cause of major head and heart aches. I
write this in the hope that it will help someone out there and you can learn
from our experiences.
Who are we?
We are a young professional couple with a couple of babies
(24 & 8 months old). As if we didn’t have enough on our plate with two
babies, we decided to buy a house in this market. After a lot of trial and error, we finally found
a house. We fell in love with the house
and could easily imagine our children growing up there.
History of the house
The house is a 100yr old craftsman house. We are the 4th owners. It was built by a ship captain in 1917, then
ladies lived there until their end.
Unfortunately they did not take care of the house, and by the time my
predecessor bought it, the roof had nearly caved in. Then my predecessor was an electrician and updated
the electrical and plumbing. Him and his
family lived in the house, updating it, until (I’m assuming a racing accident)
claimed both the wife’s legs. At which
point they stopped taking care of the house, and it fell into disrepair.
The state of the house
When we bought the house, it was definitely a ‘fixer-upper’. The floors were damaged, the walls were
cracked, and wallpaper and paint was peeling.
Structurally, and mechanically the house was salvageable. All the repairs are mostly cosmetic – or so
we thought.
Hiring contractors
We did our homework on Better Business Bureau, Yelp, Angie’s
list, reviews, photos – the works. We wanted
someone decent, easy to work with, did average to above average work, and did
not cost an arm and a leg. Reasonable? As it turns out NO! That was unbelievable difficult to find.
Contractor #1: Johnny Mak Jones and Bijia Wang from Build
and Save and a few other
At first he comes off as very approachable, reasonable and
hard worker. Then you realize he has 1
person working on the job half the time.
When due dates roll around they rush the job. At the end of the day, they did not finish any of the work they were paid to do.
But whatever the actually did, they either did it wrong or actually
caused further damage to the house! Then
to top it off, he quit and made off with $21,000 of our money. But that’s not
all! He then put a LIEN on my house claiming that the job was more difficult
than they thought and they think they should be paid more, $17,000 more! To be fair however, they did do about $4,000
worth of work.
Needless to say, lawyers were involved and I will be posting
his information in any medium I can find.
Why? Because later we found out
about what he did to other people. He is
a professional-grade scam artist. Trully.
I at least find comfort that I was taken by a professional.
Contractor #2: Khrystian Fitzgerald from Extreme Hardwoods
What can I say… Khrystian seems like a good guy. He works very hard. And I believe he is capable of doing good
work. In our case however, I just wish
he would have finished the job. He
worked on all the wood in our house (except for the windows). He did about 65% of the work and then never
heard back. We have some trim without
any finish, some rough spots on the floor, rough trim, finish over the dirt and
paint, holes in the floor. He was decent
enough not to try to collect for work not finished. This is of course money we will use to pay
someone else to finish the work. I do
still believe that under the right circumstances he could do good work, fast
and for a good price. Unfortunately,
that wasn’t our experience.
Contractor #3: Daniel Heller from Wood Windows
Oh. My. God! If you
have a craftsman house, you need a craftsman, and Daniel is IT! The windows are the jewels of our house. We have 21 windows, and he restored these 100
year old windows to be functional and beautiful. He is very knowledgeable, easy to work with,
and affordable. If you ever need to make
the decision of restoring or replacing windows, get Daniel to restore them and
increase your property value.
Contractor #4: Don from Radiant Tech Inc.
Don is a great guy.
He is very smart and can figure out a way to bring heat to your
house. He has been doing floor radiant
heat for many years. He is on time, on
price, and a pleasure. He made a big job
look easy. Now we have cozy warm floors
and did away with the radiators.
Contractor #5: Kris Gudmundson and Marc Pacheco from Five
Star Insulation
Marc is truly an artist of drywall. I had nearly 10 different contractors and
drywallers take a look at my walls. Everyone basically told me that the walls
were going to be impossible to fix.
Guess what, Marc made them look perfect!
It’s really extraordinary.
I was so pleased with the result I let Kris (the manager)
manage all the other jobs I had to do in the house. Kris pays attention to detail, has a can-do
attitude, and figures out solutions to problems. But first and foremost, he is honest, truly cares
for the quality of the work, and tries his hardest to meet the deadlines. It was easy to hire him to be my general contractor, and he managed #2, #3 and #4 along with some others workers he brought in. He is a man of his word, earns the respect of others, and I would recommend him to anyone.
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