House Under Pressure

We have spent more than $150k on home renovations in the last 7 years, using over a dozen contractors for different jobs, and this is the first experience I feel obligated to write a really unfortunate review about.

It began with timeline issues. We paid half the $8,500 estimate before the project started and were told a crew would show up Thursday morning. He texted us that morning and said he was 10 minutes away. He did not show up.

No crew. No crew all weekend, or on Monday. We had heard nothing from the owner, Adam. I called and left a very direct voicemail saying that we’d need our deposit back if a crew hadn’t started by Tuesday morning.

The issues only continued from there. The first “crew” did very poor prep work and were clearly either untrained or undirected. Adam, who said he’d be there the whole time, never showed that day.

Over the next 3 weeks (the project was supposed to take about a week to maybe 10 days to finish), it was a question mark whether Adam, a crew, or anyone at all would show up each day. On the days someone did show, they never arrived before 3pm and when there, would work until 8 or 10pm and periodically ask us to review their work in the dark. Most of the time, Adam was there by himself, without a crew, and was clearly unprepared to do some of the heavier hardscaping or digging alone.

The project, we were told, would leave our small backyard looking great. We already had a patio that we had built. We expressed in the estimate phase that we wanted:

• An area for the children to play (which we’d discussed as being a square under our deck)
• Our existing patio to be leveled and cleaned up
• A cover for our fire pit
• A chicken-friendly yard, as we have four chickens, but the main concern there was that they couldn’t get out of the yard (we had a functional fence and gate already installed for that purpose)
• A nicer-looking area leading out from our basement
• More greenery and either mulch or tough turf that could be shade-friendly
• A way to connect our existing overhead electric outside so we didn’t have an extension cord going into our house.

Adam suggested fake turf, which was a great idea and actually looks quite nice. He also suggested child-safe rubber mulch in the kids’ area, which we were happy to pay an extra $850 for to ensure the full square was covered appropriately and was safe (note – we originally told him our top budget was $7k but he insisted we couldn’t get our small backyard done for that amount, especially if we wanted any rubber mulch—and this quote didn’t include any furniture or play equipment). We increased our budget by nearly $1k to ensure a fully child-friendly play area.

We should have been tipped off when we received some odd renderings like we’ve ever gotten from a contractor, but hey, we’ve never had a landscaper before. Maybe this was what they did. So instead of blueprints or a sketch, we got some clip art-type renderings of our yard, with a different patio (even though we were keeping ours), and kind of confusing layouts. We went with it because the estimate had line itemed out the items that were being purchased, the amounts being purchased, and we discussed in detail the areas of the yard he was going to adjust.

The project wore on over 3 weeks and we got progressively concerned. The lack of consistency or crew and the length of time things were taking as Adam bought things, returned things, re-imagined various parts of the project, and came up with new and more expensive ideas was confusing. I kept asking what was left on the punch list and where we stood with the budget, and he never really gave clear answers (never once a clear answer on the budget). The working and reviewing in the dark led to QC issue after issue. We were also told early on that because we already had a pathway from our door to the patio, we would be saving roughly $1k from our estimate, which he could use to landscape our front yard or we could take back to put toward an outdoor couch.

We never found out what happened to this $1k, in fact, we were consistently told we were “over budget” but that Adam was “taking care of it,” and he provided no evidence, ever, of how or why this was the case, despite being asked many times.

We were originally told we were getting all materials “at cost” but the estimate we signed had all the fees baked into the material costs. We didn’t mind that estimate structure as he had to make a profit in some fashion; however, we don’t know where the money went because the division between profit and cost wasn’t clear, and when we started to go “over budget,” we never knew why. A crew hardly materialized, the materials used did not finish the yard (the $850 in rubber mulch covered half the small square it should have, we didn’t have enough actual mulch, we never got a fire pit cover, the electrical request was never addressed (despite my asking about it four times) and about 20% of the job was left undone at the end.

Further, throughout the project, we were asked to pay installments sometimes 24 hours apart because Adam was “running out of money” to buy supplies. This seemed very unusual and unprofessional to us but as he’s a small operation, and we wanted our yard complete, we acquiesced.

To his credit, Adam was super friendly and has an artistic eye. But there is no attention to detail, time management, and money management. He told us on three separate occasions he was “done” with the yard when in fact he had left the following:

• A fence painted in two different colors and not even fully painted – all the parts at the bottom were unpainted (he “threw this (painting the fence) in” even though we asked him three times not to paint our fence and focus on the work at hand)
o He tried to fix the duo-tone issue he created twice but because he painted it in the dark, it is STILL quite visibly two-toned (see videos). He used paint he found on sale and did not make an effort to match the paint he had started with. We are going to re-paint the fence.
• He installed stepping stones before painting them, so all the sides were unpainted. He “fixed this” by painting the sides of 75% of the stones and the other sides were untouched; we finally had to do it.
• He elected not to level the area devoted to the children’s play space and leave a half-area with rubber mulch and the other half a steeped pile of spikey rocks. This was never truly fixed – it was leveled out a little bit and many of the rocks were removed after we asked to have it fixed, but was still steeped and was not fully covered in any mulch, much left child-friendly mulch, with rubber mesh exposed everywhere.
• He destroyed our gate and about 15 feet of our fence. He had removed all of this to get equipment in and out of our yard and never put it back together or re-installed any of it properly (the cement his crew used to try and re-attach the gate was about 1” deep and on top of a step, so the gate quickly fell out of it after he left), despite being asked to four different times and saying he would. Our chickens are regularly leaving our yard now and going into our neighbor’s yard while we try to repair the damage. The missing 15ft of fence was never put back on or painted.
• His equipment destroyed a step we had leading from the original gate/our driveway into our yard. The new step was poorly done and much higher than the last one, meaning our child can no longer get in and out of our yard without being lifted. We are starting over and removing the step so we can have something shorter and more in line with the looks of the rest of the landscape.
• Not enough rubber or regular mulch was purchased to cover everything, and there were clearly bare areas that hadn’t been touched. We were told on 9/29 that $850 of additional mulch was coming between 10/2 and 10/8, and we had a screenshot from Amazon, but to date (10/8) we have not received it and our follow-ups have been fully ignored.
• Did not remove a good bit of the debris, and regularly used our own items without asking (buckets, paint equipment, for some reason someone was pouring out the chickens’ water and food every day and throwing their buckets over the fence).
• Our patio was leveled a little bit by the first crew, but they did a terrible job and it’s still not remotely level. Our pathway also still juts out in a weird way from when it was first installed (a home job by us) and that was supposed to be one of the things that was fixed with the $8,500.
o In fact, the patio “work” resulted in a drainage issue so that now when it rains, water pools up in a corner of the patio. Adam was supposed to fix this and for all I know he tried, but I’m typing this while staring at a pool of water on my patio.

Adam took a blank canvas of a yard, which needed a lot of TLC, and removed a lot of straw, installed some lovely turf, made a nice design with stones, dug out an area for our chicken coop, and tried to paint the fence. He worked his ass off, just not efficiently or with a solid direction in mind, and he made tons of mistakes. Then, at the end, it seemed he realized the thing had gone on too long and he was mismanaging his finances, and he wrapped it up so hastily it ended up being really poor quality.

Adam felt he and my husband had some sort of understanding because Brandon is our Good Cop, so he took to texting him exclusively, stating that my text messages were something along the lines of “disturbing.” My texts had no threats, name-calling, or whatever you might want to suggest, but were simply direct statements about the work that was left undone and how I needed to have our communication on the record, not in phone calls or in-person discussions, in case we needed to pursue the issue further legally. I held off on paying him the final installment of $1k for 48 hours because the job wasn’t done (see videos below), and I got many texts and emails about his crew needing to be paid. I never got answers, receipts indicating the materials had been purchased in the quantities promised, or follow-ups on the items he left hanging after he got paid (our front yard—which should have been paid for—the destroyed fence, the poorly painted fence, etc).

Don’t, I repeat don’t, use this service. You will pay a fortune, be made to feel responsible for someone else’s emotional turmoil, and end up with a mess of a yard you’ll spend 25+ hours and $1k fixing yourself.

A full chronicling of every text message, evidence of the various states of our yard, and the clip art is available here.

https://houseunderpressurellcbackupmaterials.wordpress.com/2019/10/08/backup-info-for-house-under-pressure-llc-experience/

You can see my frustrated videos of the state of the yard after he was “done” the first time and then after the “done” second time, when he got paid. The second video was not sent to him (it was just for my own frustration and recordkeeping; I was still trying to be moderately cordial at the time so I didn’t send it to him) but I asked him repeatedly about several of the issues (see text exchanges) and he ignored me after he was paid. We currently have a demand letter pending for receipts and may unfortunately have to pursue Small Claims court if we don’t get a response.

Video 1 (note that the materials on the ground were for the playhouse, which we bought and my husband built, so those materials aren’t leftover from Adam):

This was filmed the day AFTER Adam said he was done and I walked around the yard with him pointing out all the remaining issues, which he then “fixed” and this is the result:

https://youtu.be/w8UpfdaA5rI


Video 2 (after Adam came back out with a couple friends and worked in the dark so they could get paid):

https://youtu.be/xixjWNn9qug More...