I hired Kevin (the owner of this company) to remodel my bathroom, change some faucets, and repair the leaking shower room in the basement. Kevin was always late in arriving at the home to work, at least later than what he promised. I would say you need to add at least an hour to his promised time to expect him to arrive. Note that before we signed the contract, I asked him whether he could complete the work before May 30 (the work started on around May 25) and he said "Yes". It turned out that he was later using this as an excuse to justify the poor quality of his work, that he was in a rush to complete the job. Well, I would say no customer would sacrifice quality just to meet deadlines. Besides, the only reason why I wanted to complete the work before that date was because starting on that date there was another contractor who will start another project in my house, and I didn't want these two work to overlap. So, I was simply asking whether he could complete the work before then, and if not, we could wait until the other contractor had completed the work to start the project. But he told me that he could start the work immediately, which suggests that he could meet the deadline. Then, during the work he added several small projects and of course, the price kept going up. Initially I felt okay. After all, I haven't done much to my house since moving in more than 10 years ago. After smashing the tiles in the basement shower, he told me that he needed to do the waterproof and change the wall ceramics. But I needed to add at least $3,000 on top of the contract price. I was really pissed off. Before him, I had several contractors come to my house to inspect the basement shower, and none of their quotes exceeded $1,500 (including materials and all of them would do the waterproof in the foundation). He began to feel very angry after I told him this fact, saying something like "how could you compare me with those contractors? Do they even have licenses?". I said yes. He then said something like "I'm a professional. I'm different from them". I then led him to the hall bathroom, where he just changed the faucet. I showed him the uneven caulking he did and said something like "you call this professional work?" He was then really angry, saying something like "that is so uncool of you. How could you point out such small things to judge my professional quality?" After that and in an attempt to continue to trust him I agreed to add $1,600 for the basement project and we continued to work together. My wife even bought lunches for them who were still working during the weekends and the Memorial holiday, to show our appreciation for their work and sacrifice of spare times for our project. But, on the last day of the project, when I began to inspect what they did, what I saw startled me. In the basement shower, the caulking was so bad that they literally squeezed the silicone sealant there. The guy who worked in the basement even put the sealant on the faucet. There were some holes on the drywalls. The doorstep of the shower room was bad-looking from outside, but if you look inside, it was even worse (simply empty inside). The upstairs bathroom was no better. Small areas of paints were almost everywhere. They even didn't take out the caulking that I initially did around the shower base (to fix the leaking issue myself) and re-caulk. You could see "black" areas on the ceramics of the shower room, which means they may not be put very evenly. Kevin's dad later caulked around and these areas looked better, but still I don't believe it met "professional" standard. Even the exhaust fan has some "black" areas. I later found out that it was due to Kevin (or whoever did the work) digging too big a hole on the roof to install the exhaust fan. So the bottom part of the exhaust wasn't able to cover all areas of the hole. On that last day based on our contract he was trying to collect all the dues except for $600, even if the work wasn't officially completed. He said he would come during the weekend to finish the work. Despite my dissatisfaction, I still sent him $7,500 via PayPal. I just wanted the work to be done, even though to be honest I regretted hiring him. Before using PayPal, we tried Zelle and Venmo. Zelle didn't allow an amount to exceed $3,500 and Venmo didn't work on that day for some reason. Kevin mentioned something about the fees that PayPal was charging when some of his prior customers sent him money. I said I never paid any fees when using PayPal. After failure to use Zelle and Venmo he asked me to send via PayPal. I did. But later on he asked me to cover the around $230 fees charged by PayPal. I was really pissed off. He never mentioned that I would have to cover fees before I used PayPal. It was because he had a commercial account that he had to incur fees. I eventually stopped working with him before the work was completed. He even said the "f-words" during our argument.

June 4, 2023