Generation Contracting Inc No Longer In Business

I’m not one to write reviews online, but I feel it is important that I share the experience I had hiring Generation Contracting Inc. for my home renovations. My wife and I bought our first house this spring. To be able to more comfortably afford the mortgage payment we decided to build an income suite in our basement. After speaking with several different contractors, we made the decision to go with Generation because they were priced pretty averagely, Anthony seemed professional, and they promised they could get it done in the timeframe we needed. The first couple of weeks working with Generation were pretty good. The demo went smoothly and there were no unexpected surprises in our basement. Everything was good to go for the basement suite and construction began. A few weeks in, problems started occurring. We would come home to find out that no work had been done on our basement for days at a time. Various excuses were given about why no work had been done but we were always promised that we were right on schedule and there was no need to worry. Being first time renovators, we worried that things would not be finished on time but trusted that the professionals knew what they were doing. Anthony came to us one day asking for money early because of an issue that had happened with one of his other projects. We were very accommodating and paid him what he asked for, no questions asked. Two weeks before the deadline, it became quite obvious that we would not be finishing on time. In order to rent a portion of our home in the timeframe we had planned, we moved out so that we could rent out our upstairs suite. When the promised completion date came we had no flooring, no usable kitchen, no paint on the walls, unfinished electrical and plumbing, and various other things still uncompleted. When expressing our frustrations and concerns to Anthony, Anthony would pass blame to his employees and explain how they had failed to do this or that. Anthony and his crew would often let themselves into our tenants’ suite upstairs without giving notice to our tenants. This was an issue we had to smooth over with them and was completely inappropriate for Generation to do. A month after our first promised move in date, we decided to move in. The basement still was incomplete, but it now had carpet and a nearly finished bathroom. The kitchen was still unfinished and the rest of the basement was far from finished. At this point Anthony had 90% of our money for 60% of the job. It didn’t seem like this job was a priority for Anthony and we worried that this job would not get done. Shortly after, something happened between Anthony and his employees. His foreman took over the project and we did not see Anthony for quite a while. His foreman began putting in countless hours for us trying to get this project done. He did fantastic work and we really loved the care he put into everything he did. About 6 weeks after the promised due date, Anthony fired his foreman and progress on the basement came to a halt. 10 weeks after the promised completion date, Anthony finished the kitchen to our basement and we decided that this was good enough. We wanted to be rid of him and finally have a home to live in. Various things were left incomplete including our laundry room (which was supposed to be completely insulated and dry walled, but was not). Ethernet cable was not run into the suite (there is Wi-Fi, but we were promised a few physical locations to plug into).
I do not think it was Generation Contracting Inc.’s intention to screw us over. Overall the quality of work is quite good. Everything they did was to code. The experience of working with them, however, was a nightmare. They were disorganized. Miscommunication between Anthony and his employees was more common than not. They did not respect our tenants. At the end of the day, it took ten weeks longer than they promised. I don’t think they had ever taken on a project this big before and they weren’t up to the challenge.