I was really excited to work with Jose on this project. His woodworking projects looked beautiful and he seemed knowledgeable about his craft.
He responded to our Homestars request to have 4 12ft (4ft in the ground, 8 ft out) roundwood posts installed in our backyard with concrete bases. The holes were to be 4ft deep and 2ft wide as per the concrete companies recommendations. And the purpose was to build a wooden play structure for our children.
- Jose didn't have the right tools for the job (we had to provide some)
- He wasn't aware of the concrete requirements for securing poles in the ground. His recommendations where half the depth and would have been incredibly dangerous given our use for the poles as a structure for our children to play on. He tried very hard to convince us otherwise until we showed him the concrete companies website which provided width and depth requirements. (we should have paid him for his time and asked him to leave the job at this point)
- He took twice as long to complete the work (totally ok, we understand sometime the job isn't what you thought), and insisted on staying to finish the job, not wanting to leave the job unfinished.
- The holes we had carefully measured out and provided guides for (with string and posts) ended up being dug off position (2 of them by more than 1ft off) so we ended up deciding to refill the 2 most off position poles and change our plans to accommodate the error. Incredibly disappointing.
Overall, he seemed out of his element, did not follow the project requirements we had set out in the messages before we started, furthermore made assumptions about what we wanted, was stubborn to convince otherwise, was hard to get straight answers from when things went wrong, and in the end he charged my husband double what he and I had originally agreed upon in our messages while I wasn't there.
I'm sure Jose does wonderful work when he's not working directly with clients and is working within his craft. We however were deeply disappointed with his lack of professionalism, integrity, and ability to deliver on our project.
Many red flags that I missed early on and so I learned many lessons from this project.
- Approximate cost of services:
- $1,000.00