Derek was initially very nice, showed us different colours, materials, finishes for our bathroom. He even fired one of the workers for missing a shift. That is when the problems started. Derek figured he could finish off the bathroom himself. He may be good a supervising, but he has no business building a bathroom and especially installing travertine tile. He put the wrong finished edges on the marble, and we told him immediately. He proceeded to install it and finish up the bathroom anyway. He tried to grind down the tile to fix the huge defects but ruined the finish on the tile. His website (and his claims) were that the job was not done until we were happy. His toned very quickly changed when we kept the 10% holdback until the job was finished correctly. We were then sent a bunch of very nasty and quite disturbing emails from him threatening us. Our lawyer had to send him a registered letter to tell him to back off. Needless to say, the job was never completed properly. Kind of like having all the parts to a Mercedes Benz in your garage and putting it together with duct tape and string. We had numerous contractors in to evaluate the work, and ALL said the whole thing had to be redone (because the tile was not done properly and was tied to everything).
His contract is nothing more than a "cover his ass" letter. All of the promises his states in person and on his website are NOT in the contract. DO NOT SIGN HIS CONTRACT, or at least put a stipulation that Derek will NOT do ANY of the work.
(As a side note, his sub-trades - electrical and plumbing) did a great job as did some of his workers. After our lawyers read his letters, they instructed us to call the police should he EVER set foot on our property again.
