Sam The Handyman

We hired Sam to do some work after speaking with him and really enjoying his laid back approach. We've found a lot of contractors to be quite pushy but instantly liked Sam.

Unfortunately the work turned out to be very poor. We had him take a look at our skylight which appeared to have leaked in the past but which we had never had a problem with. He said that installing a rubber flashing all around the skylight extending out by a couple of feet would ensure that we never had problems. Sounded fine to me so we had him do the skylight work as well as some much needed caulking around a door and window as well as repairing a piece of siding that had come loose.

So as for the work...

The caulking was terribly sloppy. There were giant gobs everywhere and smears of it on adjacent flashings. His siding repair job consisted of drilling a couple of big silver screws in to hold it in place. And the skylight (which hadn't leaked in the several months we had owned the house)began to leak a few months later.

We called Sam who went back up on the roof and said it was probably our roof that was the problem but that he would put some more caulking around this rubber flashing he'd installed. The damage to our ceiling below the skylight was dismissed as "That's easy for you to fix". Anyway, fast forward a couple of weeks to the next big rainfall and voila... more leaking!!

Now I'm a pretty handy person but was very busy with work and things at the time we had the work done. I didn't really have time to do it myself figured that a professional might do a better job than I. A professional job was not what we got. Frustrated by the latest leak and not wanting to rely on someone else's opinion any longer, I go up to the roof to see what is happening and take a good look at this rubber flashing. The rubber flashing is itself leaking and trapping and holding water underneath it.

Further, the real problem (and a fairly obvious one) is that the skylight has a ridge where the plexiglass goes into the framework of the skylight. That ridge was collecting water and has only a few chunks of old dried up caulking remaining. Water was running off the dome into this ridge, through the housing and into our house.

I ripped out all of the rubber flashing he installed that was trapping water and recaulked the plexiglass and wow... no more leaks!!

All in all, we got taken by this guy. Although he is very pleasant, his work is sloppy and unprofessional. I could not recommend him to anyone.