Tuckpointing disappointment. The absolute worst experience in every imaginable way. Do not…read morerecommend hiring this company for anything.
Every single promise was broken, my family was put through too much of unnecessary drama filled with countless excuses and tremendous amounts of stress from start to finish due to lack of basic job site oversight, utter negligence, disregard for safety, and simply horrible communication throughout the project.
The job was supposed to be completed in under a month starting in late September 2020 (pending favorable weather conditions), we're going on our full YEAR now in September of 2021, so this project has been out of control.
They were hired to restore and repair the damaged brick around 2 of the basement windows and perform full house tuckpointing on an older historic house built in 1930's. About a week after the work started, the original crew was switched with a promise of a "better one" and then the problems began escalating fast.
The very first day, the new (second) crew left a forty foot ladder unsecured and abandoned the job site in the middle of the day, the ladder came crashing down and tore off the downspout, thankfully not hurting anyone but causing a lot of anxiety to my family and neighbors that have kids running around and cars parked nearby. The downspout remained collapsed in my front yard and not fixed through fall, winter, spring and summer months causing the rain water pour down free from the roof on the walls. Next, they set up the scaffolding on the front of my house and again disappeared for days on end without any communication or coherent explanations and then days turned into weeks of this abandoned scaffolding with loose boards sometimes flying off during the storms and threatening our picture-windows. When the workers eventually came back to continue the work, the quality was so poor (many blade scuffs on brick faces of the front wall, mortar color mismatch, irreparable damage to the ornamental limestones and front door frame) and the company owner was virtually absent - despite many promises to be at the site daily - unresponsive to my calls, I had no other choice but to seek the original subcontractors of the first crew myself, thankfully they were still in the area working on a friend's house. At that time, I was reassured that my house was going to take priority with everything fixed and finished in a linear fashion, crews switched back, and with no more delays (weather permitting). Well, this dragged on to winter time and the project had to stop until spring.
When project resumed in March, the engagement was very spotty due to the intermittent weather but seemed to have been put "back on track" with my constant calling and texting to ensure that a schedule of work is communicated and delivered as promised. Then, everything just halted and again the crew disappeared for over 4 months, showing up only to unload materials for the remaining work and barely resuming on what's left of the house at the end of June. We were told numerous stories about what is happening basically holding us hostage at our own house with scattered debris, hanging cable lines and sand piles in the middle of our driveway while they were apparently doing other jobs.
Unacceptable conduct. It took me literally hundreds of texts with "what's going on" and "any updates" (most of which went unanswered) to get to the bottom of the issue that seemed to have been stemming from some broken deals between the subcontractors and the owner, and money owed from the other aggressive underbids being paid for by the false promises of future work. According to the subcontractor, it was some kind of pyramid scheme. The owner, of course, offered his side of the story, but, in the end, the project remained on hold until another (third) crew was brought to complete the project in late August. The third crew was somewhat more diligent and mostly on time but not highly skilled as became evident by the sloppy overbrushed mortar on bricks, another chipped glass block window in the basement and, to add insult to injury, complete mortar color mismatch on the last wall and touchups. These so called "touchups" look like someone vomited on our walls and then attempted to spread it around.
By the way, I have agreed to pay higher than the originally asked price for the job to get it finished, the owner wouldn't even handle this part, instead I had to pay the subcontractors directly (first and second crews only, we didn't pay extra for the third crew). In any case, I was promised that the additional projected cost would come off as a discount for my next project (driveway, front porch); however, this discount never actually materialized on paper, and, needless to say, we won't be doing any more future business with this company.
This project was a colossal failure in every aspect: bad quality of work, non existent time management, awful communication and way over budget.
