Unlicensed & unprofessional. We hired Askar for a small patch job on our wooden table. He said with confidence that he could fix it, and when he arrived, he offered to fix other things around the house if we wanted. There were two spots on the wood and our mantel that needed patches, and we also needed the front of our driveway repaved. He quoted us for both and we felt the price was a little high, so we negotiated a small discount. After he looked up online how much the materials cost, he changed his quote and said it would cost more. We were kind of annoyed and told him we could only afford a certain amount, so we finally agreed on a price.
My husband told him the exact paint to buy to match our walls and said it could only be found at Dunn-Edwards. Askar either wasn't listening or paying attention, bc he came back with Behr paint and did the job and it didn't match at all.
For the table, he bought wood markers which we already owned. I asked him if that was all he was going to use (because if so, I could literally do that myself & just fill in the wood) but he said he was also going to use a stain & some other stuff to fix it. I said ok, trusting that he knew better than I did, which is why I hired someone in the first place. He spent a long time on it, & I was getting worried that he didn't know what he was doing, but I didn't want to bug him. He was checking his phone a lot & I was thinking either he's looking up how to do this right, or he's just taking a lot of breaks. When he stepped outside to work on the pavement, I checked the table, and I was horrified. It looked 1000 times worse than it did before. The original damage was about 2in and could be hidden under a coaster. He had expanded the damage to 7in, which a lot harder to hide! I asked him if he was finished and if that was how it was gonna look, and he said no, that after it dried, he was going to sand it down....???? I wanted to trust him, and said "that's going to make it look better than it does now?" And he said yes. It of course didn't make it look better, it just looked worse. I was so pissed off.
When he was doing the pavement, I asked him if I needed to move my car so it wouldn't be trapped in the driveway while the pavement dried. He said no, that I didn't need to move it and it'd be dry that day. That didn't make sense to me, but he was already halfway doing it, so I just let it go. And sure enough, he tells my husband when he gets home that we can't drive on it for a couple days, which is exactly what I thought. Also when my husband got home, he saw that Askar didn't extend the new gravel all the way to the street, which is what he had asked him to do. So again, either he's a bad listener or not paying attention, or he doesn't speak English very well, even though he seemed to know the language just fine.
He also made a mess everywhere he went. He tracked in grease/tar from outside onto our door mats & marked up our doorknobs and door. When we pointed it out, he didn't realize he had done it. There's nothing he could do about the mats, and that annoyed me even more as the one outside was a $150 custom mat that we've owned for 8 years and has held up well after all this time, & he ruined it. We tried washing it but the grease won't come out.
When all the work was done, I was so pissed off by the whole thing. I didn't want to pay him a dime, but my husband wanted to be nice and told him we'd only pay for outside, which was only $350 less than what he quoted us. He complained of course & said he worked all day, which I totally understand. He was there a long time, but it was such shoddy awful work, that I couldn't believe he was getting upset about giving us a discount when he messed up so bad. He knew he ruined the table, & he offered to take it and refinish the entire thing for free, but we didn't trust him to do that if he was so incompetent with the other small tasks we had asked him to do. He also offered to go buy the right paint and fix the paint job, but at this point, we just wanted him gone so told him it was fine & to just leave it.
My husband ended up paying him half of the inside, which was generous & more than Askar deserved for the work he had done. He also got mad & left the bag of gravel outside & we were unsure if he had even finished the job properly.
Overall just really upset by the whole thing & should've never hired someone with zero reviews outside of 6 unrecommended Yelp reviews, which are prob unrecommended bc he got friends to post them. But was trying to trust someone who might have left a company or wanted to form their own company. But it really just seems like Askar has no handyman, contractor, or construction background, & just needs a job. Which if that were the case, he should be a waiter where he only risks messing up food orders, not someone's home. In all our 16 years of living here & how many countless workers we've hired for the house, this was by far our worst experience. read more