WORST CONTRACTOR EVER! I DO NOT RECOMEND MARIO TO ANYONE! I was very disappointed by the quality of work provided not to mention the fact that our house was robbed while him and his team were on site. Mario kept asking for money and were naive enough to give it to him until we realized that he was playing us. He did not know what he was doing and he hired inexperience workers who did a poor job under poor guidance. We had to FIRE him and hire someone else. On a $230,000 budget for an addition, we ended up paying $150,000 MORE to fix his mistakes.
Here are a few of the major issues I had with this company:
1) There was not one single straight wall built by Mario.
2) None of the 3 washrooms he did were done right. All of them had poor tiling (had to be redone) and he broke the heated floors we wanted installed
3) There was poor electrical work. He could have burnt our house down. The ESA discovered that he brought unlicensed electricians on site!
4) His renovations were not up to code. Before firing Mario I noticed cracks and sagging on two beams he had installed. I got my new contractor to open up the walls and realized that for the support posts Mario used 2x4 instead of 6x8 profiles. Mario decided himself to remove a post from the approved plan. He was dishonest stating that his engineer approved to this change. After firing Mario, I called the city inspector for a full inspection. He failed the beam as it was a structural hazard. Apparently, Mario's engineer was not a licensed engineer and could not have approved anything! He put my family at risk.
5) Workers did not come to work on my house for days. Thus, Mario never met discussed deadlines.
6) On extremely numerous occasions, Mario threatened not to return to work unless weekly payments were received, even though he had not progressed in his work.
7) Mario built a porch, supporting my son’s balcony, with a very poor foundation which showed cracks immediately. This was an obvious hazard.
Horrible experience for my entire family.
- Approximate cost of services:
- $240,000.00
- Company Response
There’s so much we could say about this homeowner who hides his identity, but to simply put, he neither pays nor has any respect. We had hard time bringing our sub-trades to continue working because of the way they were treated by the homeowner. Moreover, our accounting department record show late payments, bounced payments, and balance due. For this reason, our management decided to have our team exit the premises until the issues are resolved. No contractor would want to experience such homeowner by receiving bouncing cheques, untruthfulness, and furthermore paying for the homeowners’ materials and costs of labor.
We’ve worked with hundreds of homeowners for over 20 years and had never had an individual who was hostile to work with. The person who had no idea to what it takes to build a home addition, and who, after having 95% of his job neatly completed, decided to ridicule our company with false reviews on multiple websites, using multiple false accounts, and inconceivably using his 14-year-old daughter’s name.
Last year our company left the premises after working for three weeks during the holiday season because of not receiving any payments for material or labor. The homeowner furthermore requested extra jobs which were not included in the contract, and did not want to pay for them. What is more, he was not able to decide on his newly developed plans regarding his home addition after numerous disputes with his wife.
Rest assure that our engineer is licensed, as our electricians and plumbers, or else we would not have the approved permits by the city to begin the job. All work has been done according to code, passing city inspections.
We work hard helping homeowners to achieve their goals, but we do not waste our time on projects and individuals who are not following mutual agreements. We started this addition project on September 9/2014 and left the premises on January 9/2015 for payment reasons. Two days later, the homeowner called us, begging us to return and promising to pay on schedule. After these promises, he failed to make any further payments and we left the premises again lastly on January 29/2015.
The homeowner decided to complete the job of laying the floors by himself because he ran out of budget and that was the end of the home addition.
Legal charges will be followed by this message for posting false information, hurting our reputation.