I am a Durham home owner, and my husband and I have been completely dissatisfied with Rick Howell and his team. We hired Rick to do some simple fixes around our rental home way back in December last year. He always showed up on time and completed the jobs. We decided to tackle a variety of larger projects, and we hired Rick for the job. We wanted him to complete a new roof, paint the total exterior of the house, and do some upgrades in the kitchen. We began talking the project over with Rick in February of this year. We then did two stupid things: 1.) we paid Rick in full at the outset and 2.) we moved and were not around to micro manage him. We told Rick that we were moving abroad in June and we needed the work completed well before that deadline. "No problem," was his usual response. We hired a property manager and moved out of North Carolina in June. We began calling Rick to see how things were going since we knew he had not completed a single item on our list. He never returned our phone calls and was totally uncommunicative then by email or text, too. We blew up his phone and email and finally - weeks later - he responded saying his family had been camping. By now, this was mid July and he hadn't finished the paint or begun the roof. We gave him some new deadlines and more closely monitored his work through our property manager. By August, we called Rick over and over wanting updates. He never responded to us. We sent him an email demanding a refund since Rick still hadn't done any work on the roof and hadn't completed the other work. After ignoring our phone calls and requests for him to call us back for days on end, Rick responded to the email minutes after I sent it. He said - extremely conveniently - that he would be starting the roofing the next day. We fell again for his lies and gave him some new deadlines. By mid-September, Rick had still not completed the job. The painting was not completed in some areas and Rick laid roof on top of rotten wood. At the very start of the project we walked around the house and pointed out to him each piece of rotten wood for him to replace. Then we did this again in June. Then our property manager did it again in July. Each time, Rick said, "Yes, we will take care of that." For anything that Rick actually did do - - we had to beg him to do it. He claimed over and over that the paint job on the exterior was complete. Then we would go look at it and find that he had never painted the crawl space brick around the house, for instance. Or he had never replaced storm windows he took off. He told us over and over that the kitchen was complete, but then our tenants sent us photos showing that he still had much work to complete like replacing the face plates of the sockets, filing off the edges of the new counter tops and other myriad items. Rick always acted like he was doing us a favor when he would go back and finish his own work because we'd caught him in a lie. Our tenants had a messy yard from June until September because during the days and weeks between the times Rick actually worked there - - he left a huge mess in the yard. We finally ended up losing money with our tenants because we needed to compensate them for living in his mess. They also complained about comments made by his crass employees who brought their girlfriends to the job site. When we told Rick about this, he told us that he fired those employees. Rick either lied to us or he lied here on yelp when responding to our property manager's comment about this. In short, Rick is wholly unreliable, uncommunicative, sloppy, and was completely unwilling to do anything about our dissatisfaction. It is impossible to have a logical discussion with him. He is masterful at shifting blame, and best of all, blaming the weather for his inability to complete tasks - - even indoor tasks! I would never hire Rick again and grieve the loss of $12,000 that we paid him. We might as well have thrown that money out the window. We are now faced with the need to hire a team to come in and fix the painting issues and rip off parts of the existing roof to replace wood that Rick should have replaced. When we sent photos of his work to him and asked him what he thought of his own work, he acknowledged that the work was inferior. Then the blame game began, as always. We feel completely ripped off.
-Traci M. read more