My husband and I hired Stokey's to do a variety of projects and we would not recommend them at all. There were a significant number of miscommunications, both during the proposal process as well as during the projects, their craftsmanship was amateur at best, they arrived late every day (an hour late), and the worst thing was, they ended up causing water damage to our kitchen ceiling.
The initial walk through was fine and Greg was pleasant to start. However, getting a final bid was a nuisance, as Greg does not handle any of his invoicing or administrative tasks, so details kept getting left out or lost in translation. We had several back and forth emails with his colleague Tiffany (I believe she is also his wife), who then had to go back to Greg to verify, and it was several weeks until we had agreement on the work. This should have been our ultimate red flag to withdraw ourselves from hiring them. We initially hired them to do a variety of projects including rebuilding our front porch, repairing a few areas of siding that had dry rot, fixing plumping on our upstairs bathroom, and a couple other projects. The front porch rebuild was a disaster. The wood was the incorrect size and it was not sanded at all before being nailed in. We had to ask them to go back to the hardware store and obtain wood that was the correct size and rebuild again. The plumbing repair was a bigger disaster. As I was cooking dinner in the kitchen, I suddenly hear water rushing through down through my ceiling light fixtures. Apparently Greg's assistant, Tracey, had removed the pipe while the upstairs bathtub was draining. Tracey's mistakes caused significant damage to our ceiling.
We were stunned and frustrated and told them to finish the front porch but do not start any other projects. We told them we would get an estimate for the ceiling repair and to remove the estimated cost from the final invoice. Rather than graciously moving on and accepting our decision, Greg called my husband proceeded to lecture him saying, "I've been doing this longer than you've been alive. Haven't you ever made a mistake? Everyone deserves second chances. Tracey had a bad day, blah blah blah..." My husband could not get a word in because Greg talks a lot. I told him to hand the phone to me and he told me the same sob story, asking us to let him finish all the projects. At this point I was livid. I told him to finish the front porch and we will go from there if we are satisfied. I also told him to check in with us before making key decisions and just generally check in frequently so we could kind of monitor things, given what had happened. Greg did not remember to check in, and my husband had to literally keep an eye on him. A few other irritating things to note is that Greg lives in Tacoma and was difficult to schedule (we live in Seattle). He did three days of work and was only able to come up one day a week, so it took three weeks to literally do a front porch repair and one dry rot repair on our rear siding. Additionally, he lost our black screws for our porch handrail and used regular silver screws instead, installed them in crooked, and stripped the screws. We had to ask him to replace the screws and put them in straight. Also, he forgot our paint at his house and had to go back to the hard ware store to buy more paint, which of course resulted in more time and materials on the job. Lastly, the final invoice was incorrect and it included receipts that were not ours, so we had to ask them to remove them.
All in all, a horrifying experience and a nuisance to work with and I am so glad this engagement is over. read more
