An absolute thief, I do not know how else to put it. If I could, he would get zero stars since even one star is far too generous.
I hired Helbig to do a whole-house rehab and it was a nightmare. Things started off pretty well as far as workers there making progress. He had some hard workers working for him, but as I found out later, they were not necessarily skilled workers. He was quick to fire guys, so there was also a lot of turnover in the time he was on my project.
The job should have been finished in 6-8 weeks (by Jan 08.), but it was not finished until June. Well, he was ""finished"" in Feb., but the work that had to be re-done took until June to be finished.
Here are some examples of their so-called craftsmanship:
* installed a floating laminate floor in the LR and DR - they nailed it down! Once the humidity came in May, the floor buckled and warped. I had to tear it all out and have it replaced (this is when I found out just how many nails they used).
* Had a new roof installed, some high winds in March blew a bunch of shingles off. Called in a roofer hoping that it was a repair job and they could use the extra shingles I had. Nope. It all had to be torn off and re-done. Oh, and there was bad wood on the roof that had to be replaced. I called Helbig first to see what he would do about it, he blamed to supplier saying he gave them bad materials. Uh, nope.
* Had new brushed nickel hinges put on all the doors and his painter (Andre) ended up painting over all of them.
* Installed a new double vanity in the bathroom, they never secured it to the wall.
* A new concrete pad was poured in front of the garage in Nov, by March it was chipping and breaking apart.
* The guy they hired to build a wooden porch over the concrete steps designed a nice looking porch, the final product was not so well-built. I had to replace some screws, there was poor fit and places where there should have been screws had nails.
* The stairway had a nice wooden bannister that I wanted to keep. Andre/Andre's guys painted it white.
* For some reason, it took Andre three coats (and over a month) to cover new drywall with biege Sherwin-Williams paint.
Then there are his business practices.
* Hooked him up with a guy I know who has a roofing supply business. They bought the roofing material and 15 windows from him AND NEVER PAID THE BILL. I ended up paying for that stuff twice.
* We had agreed that any changes had to be approved via written change orders since I had a limited budget. In Feb he gave me an invoice for over $6,000 of additional charges and I had received exactly zero change orders. Some of the charges were for things that had to be re-done because they screwed up the first time.
* Toward the end of Jan his guys started getting pulled to work on another job, so the pace on mine slowed down by a lot. Eventually he basically walked out, which was fine because at the time it looked like there were just some minor things left to finish up. I did those.
All in all, he cost me about $9,000 out-of-pocket to fix the stuff they screwed up (in addition to $27,000 I had paid out to him).
Needless to say, I would NEVER recommend Helbig for any kind of work, especially anything that costs more than Free.
I did some checking around before I hired him (in Nov 07) and came up empty as far as negative reviews. I initially found them thru ServiceMagic, but I guess it is safe to say that using that site does not keep away unscrupulous contractors like Helbig. Too bad reviews like these were not around to be found back then.
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