Right at Home Repair & Remodeling

Janet

Want a job done the way you want it to be done & want feedback from your contractor-then this guy is not for you! We put over 19K into his pockets. 1st project was the removal of old carpet from our newly purchased home & having tile laid (good job). The first indication Brent doesn’t communicate with his customers is when we gave him the security code to our house to ensure the alarm would not go off. We visited the house while the crew was working & they left before us. We, of course, armed the house when we left. Brent did not tell us he had not given the code to his crew thus leaving our house unsecured & so when they entered the next day, the alarm went off, the police arrived. Once it was established they weren’t burglars, the police left. Five minutes later the crew entered again through another door, off went the alarm..police again & a $192 fine was levied. I emailed Brent numerous times as what to do. No reply. When I next saw him I showed him the letter from the police, he said he’d take care of it. 2nd on our project list was removing the trim & widening the pantry door to 43”, putting cupboards in the pantry (looks great), removing a wall in the kitchen (looks great except for one seam where not enough mud was applied & it is concave), putting in 2 new windows (looks great) & moving the west block wall forward. We also wanted to move the east wall 40’ forward from its existing location but were awaiting HOA approval so Brent did not bid on this. Because we would not be in the U.S. during the jobs we asked to be given status updates, he said he would & send photos. After we left the country, our house checker let us know we’d received a final letter from the Phoenix police. We had to pay the alarm fine. We again let Brent know about the fine he was responsible for by his crew setting off the alarm twice. No reply. Do you see a pattern here? We scrambled to pay the fine via our house checker…$192 + service fees. Only once did Brent get in touch with us on his own initiative & that was when he ran into problems with removing the wall in the kitchen. The plumbing would have to be moved for an added cost. We agreed to the extra cost. But other than him asking for money, we received no updates so we had no idea of how the jobs were progressing other than what our house checker told us. The only time photos were received of the completed work from Brent is when we were asked for the last payment & before settling the account we asked for photos. Since he had not bid on the east wall move only saying he would schedule it & we didn’t receive a Remodeling Service Order for our okay, we were quite surprised to receive a bill for this as well. The charge was well above the other bid we had & had we received a RSO from Brent with this quote we would have went with the lower bid. But we’re trusting people & so we paid it because we believed he had done the work to our specifications. We had no reason to think that he hadn’t carried out our wishes as to what we wanted done because we had received no word from him that would indicate otherwise. When we arrived back in Phoenix & visited the house, first inspection, looked great but imagine our surprise to see that the pantry doorway had not been widened to 43”. Actually, it appeared that only the trim was removed & the open end of the doorway had been drywalled, finished, textured & painted...see photos. I emailed him many times asking for an explanation as *we have to know what is going on * explaining that all our plans were on hold, the house cleaning, the furniture, etc. until this was sorted & we had a tight timeline before leaving the country. Also left voice messages on his answering machine. No response. This went on for 2 days until Brent finally replied-what is the issue with the pantry door. Huh! Then he claimed he had never received my emails. But, I have a read option & all my emails had been read. He then went on to say he couldn’t widen the doorway because there was a king stud in the wall & it would cost thousands. So why hadn’t he contacted us when he hit this snag? It would be our decision as to whether or not to proceed...not his. The next time & only time we saw him again is when he showed up to look at a problem with the grout between 2 tiles, it had turned to dust. He claims it is due to over sponging, with his track record we will wait & see if all the other grout disintegrates. While he was there I pointed out the pantry doorway that had been widened by another contractor to measure 43" & who had not found a king stud when the wall was opened (extra cost to us $726 to complete a job we had already paid Brent to do). The next story as to why he couldn't widen it was the way the house was built, a truss was in the pantry wall supporting the roof & the wall would crack. (I researched trusses & here is what I found “You can span a large distance with a truss and the truss transmits all of the weight to the exterior walls. Therefore, none of the interior walls are "load-bearing," so they can go anywhere and are easily moved later.) Asked him why the east block wall he’d moved had only been moved 35’. I reminded him we had wanted to move it 40’ forward & had approval to do so. He said the HOA has a builder’s setback of 5’. (after he left I measured how far he'd put the setback it is 6’3” not 5'. This guy seems to be measurement challenged. 1st the pantry doorway & now the block wall). Again, why didn't he get in touch with us. Maybe it's because there is no such thing as builder’s setback in the HOA’s CC&R’s. Bottom line is we had approval to move it 40’. There are many houses in this subdivision who have moved their walls to the front of the house. Again, we have to pay someone else to do the job as we wished & for which we already paid Brent to do. Bids to move the wall are in the range of $700-800 quite a difference from $1317 Brent charged. I have asked many times for a cost breakdown on why he charged us so much but again he just ignores us. Which makes me wonder if he inflated the bill, why else not send us a cost breakdown. A question I put to him-has he ever considered communicating with his customers! After all, it is our money. Unfortunately, we trusted Brent to honour his contract with us. We honoured if from our end. Didn’t so much as offer us an apology for not keeping us informed & not doing what we hired him to do. Looked puzzled that we were angry because we expected to see what we had paid for. Avoid this guy like the plague because he will not own up to his mistakes & figures if he sticks his head in the sand long enough all questions will go away.