Contractor Makes Beach Dreams End in Disaster

Trying to find a contractor isn’t easy. It’s hard to find someone that will show up and do what you’ve paid for. This is my experience. 

We liked Ian when we first met; he's likable. We were interviewing other contractors for our condo renovation and decided on Ian in part because he was very responsive (at least initially), took a consultative approach, and showed up on time for meetings.

We signed and made our initial deposit at the end of December 2021, with the demo to start the last week in January 2022. We would be out of town during the renovation and come in weekly or bi-weekly to check on progress.

The demo started on time and was done fairly quickly. To our complete and udder shock our laundry room, which was not part of the contract, was also demoed. We had planned to do the laundry room a year or two after the renovation due to cost/budget. To make matters worse our new washer and dryer were gone! They had been 'recycled'. They were about to take our new refrigerator but, luckily for us, we happened to check in that day and my wife stopped them. I don't believe this was an accident or believe that they were 'recycled'. Ian said there must've been some mistake. 

REALLY??! You think??!!! The washer, dryer, and refrigerator all still had protective plastic on them! This is where everything started to go wrong. 

From there everything started to go wrong. After the demo, Ian said we needed more electrical work than what was already in the contract, which we did as an addendum to the contract. We expected it would go well but then the electrician disappeared and never completed their work.

Throughout this Ian kept telling us to make sure we had our new appliances, cabinets, furnishings, etc. (going forward I'll refer to these items as products). to be delivered because they had other jobs and a tight schedule to keep. So throughout February and early March we had the product delivered. We would check with Ian to confirm delivery, and he would always say everything arrived and was fine and on schedule. This wasn't the case as some of our bathroom tile broken. Ian said it broke when delivered, but the delivery driver never noted anything; more importantly Ian didn't tell us it was broken until days later. 


When we were able to go down in March, we found the situation was worse than we thought. Nothing material had been done since the demo, but the situation was worse. In addition to not having removed all of the trash from the demo, our new products were there too, which made it harder to work and put our products in the middle of all this mess and construction. 


So why had no work been done? Ian said he had other jobs that were taking longer, and another customer’s daughter was complaining and threatening to sue over her parents kitchen not being completed. Yes, this scared me, but we wanted to keep this project moving so in mid-March I had a talk with Ian to get back on track. Ian assured me that the 8-week project was still on track and he would finish on time. Ian was not answering calls or texts as consistently as he had when he first started. 


On April 5th, after 8 weeks came and went, I had another talk with Ian. He was committed to getting our project done and gave me his 'honest assessment' of how long it would take to complete and provided a schedule of what would be done and when. The number of people working on our unit was inconsistent, and whenever we would c

What else happened:
    • Smoking in our house. We’d find cigarettes inside, or on the patio and we were clear there was no smoking in our unit. 
    • Complaints to our HOA due to trash. Ian was told repeatedly to throw it away and never did. Parking in other owners’ spots. Ian and his staff were told where they could park but didn’t listen.
    • The demo was never completed – trash, including old toilets, were never removed. Buckets of dirty water were left in the unit.
    • Food boxes and soda cans left all over the place.
    • Our new washer was left outside on our deck for days. My neighbor called to tell me that it was out there. Then the HOA called me to tell me the same and that my patio door was open during a rainstorm.
    • His staff opened boxes of appliances and other products that should never have been opened. This just left the product at greater risk of damage. His staff had the nerve to tell my wife that one of the boxes (our coffee system) ‘just fell off’. How many boxes have you ever had that fell off.
    • Our flooring – Ian had a contractor due to flooring with all of the mess there. None of the flooring was level and was left unprotected in many spaces. All the flooring had to be replaced! This was awful. Everything else was too, but that same flooring had increased a dollar more per foot since we first bought it. 
    • Waste and disregard of our materials. Wasn’t there money so what did it matter. They would cut flooring and leave large pieces unusable. 
    • Drywall – they changed the drywall but never bothered to make sure any of it was plum and level. 
    • There was more. All documented with pics and video. Too much to put in one post.
Thanks for reading this. I hope you have a better experience with whatever contractor you use.