My wife and I wanted to build out our basements last year. We contacted a few contractors and asked for bids on the project. The bids ranged from upwards of $20K to under $10K. Being cheap, we took the bid under $10K. First mistake.
We checked the guy’s references, and even visited one of the remodels that he did. My first thought was, and it was later to be proved correct, that he does not give much attention to detail. But I brushed that aside since the room that we saw looked fine, no glaring defects, and we hired the guy. He started In October of 2006 and made great progress… for a few weeks. Then he stopped showing up. No phone calls, nothing. We called him and asked, “Um… where are you?” He had injured his leg shortly before he started on the basement and the doctor told him to take it easy. Ok fine.. the guy has a bum leg.. give him some slack. After about two weeks we called again, he said that he would have his son finish the drywall and that he was still on track to finish by Christmas.
His son arrived around Thanksgiving and did the majority of the drywall… Alright now fast forward to about a week before Christmas. With nothing done since Thanksgiving, we asked for a face to face and inquired about the basement. We were going to be out for Christmas we asked for the house keys back. Well we did not get a face to face but did get the keys back. We should have gotten another contractor but we were concerned that no one would come in after this guy to finish the job.
We contacted him after we got back in town, and gave him back the keys. He insisted that his leg was ok and he was going to finish the basement in short order. Well to make a long story short, he did not restart on the job until almost the end of February, after we called him and said we wanted to talk about whether he was going to finish the job. Almost full month and a half after christmas.
He did not have an eye for finishing details. For example, he did not use any electrical outlet boxes in the builtin entertainment center to manage the 6 speaker wires, two ethernet cables, the cable for the TV and all the wires needed for the subwoofer. Instead he cut two holes in the back and pulled all the wires through. He was going to leave it like that until I pressed him on that issue.
Our basement is finished, but we will never use that contractor again. There are many other items that we were less that pleased with, and in the end we wanted him to finish and hire someone else to “clean up the mess”. We still do not have carpet down, but we hired someone to do that. We also hired another contractor to redo the fireplace. And this contractor did a fantastic job on that. Him we are going to rehire for other odd jobs we need.
From now on I will only hire someone who has a personal recommendation from someone we know, or follow my initial hunch on the work he has completed in the past.