I hope you read this report before hiring this guy. From the very start of this project there were red flags. I should have listened to my intuition.
We signed the initial estimate which was for $14,000 but after adding a few items it ended up being $22,000 dollars. We still needed to decide on some rocks. We anticipated there would still be a couple thousand dollars in additional material charges.
The work went on and was eventually finished without any word from the owner Tommy Cooper. when he gave us the final invoice it was for $32,000! My husband was at work at the time and told Tommy he was not going to pay that, so Tommy proceeded to guilt and pressure me for the money. It was very overwhelming I didn't know what to do so I decided to write him a check without seeing any documentation to justify any additional cost.
Obviously we felt blind sided and ripped off. Within the first week the stone patio he laid started heaving in (he laid it on snow) so after it warmed up it basically sank. One of the stones cracked which he blamed on my 7 year old son by saying he hit it with a hammer. When we called to ask him to come fix the patio and clean the concrete splatter off our storm door he said No problem and it looked like we still owed him $2,000. I proceeded to tell him to shove it and to send me some documentation to justify this. He text messaged me recipes. Some of the recipes clearly had nothing to do with my job and the bulk of the charges were random credit card statements around the time of my job. Even with all those vague credit card charges it still wasn't adding up. He has yet to send anything more specific and now claims we owe him an additional $3,000 not $2,000. He has called me late at night asking for the money, he has made crude/disgusting/perverted remarks to me during the job. I walked outside on four different occasions to his guys urinating in my yard, They buried my sprinkler system, everything they built is falling apart, I caught him creeping around my house at night.
more