Nasir in Toronto

I signed a contract with this company to redo our asphalt driveway and replace interlocking in the backyard and front landing. Alex made a lot of promises during the bidding stage and seemed very knowledgeable and made you feel comfortable signing with him. However, against my better judgement I paid ahead of scheduled payment schedule at his request and as soon as he had received a substantial amount, he became very difficult to deal with and he changed to a less experience crew and reduced the number of people that were coming and would only show up in the afternoon after being tired from other jobs. He went back on some work he was supposed to do and reduced the area and said I would have to pay more, if I wanted him to do it properly. The work itself is subpar, especially around the pool area that was supposed to be concrete coping, but he instead did just pavers with huge gaps between the pavers and pool siding (see attached pictures) that they tried to fill with sand and didn't even do that properly. They also did not finish the border around the front driveway until after the asphalt was put in and ended up cutting up the driveway that was not fixed. Additionally, they had torn down a fence post to get access to the backyard and did not put in a new post and instead tried to put the old post back in that did not fit. When the post was finally put in with concrete, the concrete was higher than the ground and he did not come back to put in the actual gate back or fix the grading. The front step is unstable and shakes, one of the back steps is falling apart already. There was also another issue where he quoted for add-on work in the front and when we decided to do only part of the work, he argued that the part we did not want to do anymore was "free" and he won't take that amount off the quoted amount, even though when quoting he assigned a value of $900 for that work when quoting. In the end, I overpaid for a subpar job and had to endure absolutely horrible behaviour from Alex himself. It is going to cost me in excess of $10,000 more to fix all of the work that he did not complete properly. When asked about other reviews prior to him starting the job, he said there are always two sides to the story. I should have believed those reviews over his side of the story,