I hate to leave a negative review, but I'm going to leave the review I wish I had read before engaging this company's services.
On the plus side, the worker sent to do the job, Sal, was friendly and arrived roughly on time. He was flexible to work through the inevitable issues, and stayed quite late even though the job was not completed.
Looking at a bill for over $800 at the end of the day, and the state of the job, I raised a few issues first contacting Sal directly, and when he didn't reply I raised the issues with GDR after they contacted me to schedule completing it. The issues I had were:
1) Even though the details of the job were well described in advance including with photos, Sal didn't have the necessary tools and materials to do the job. The job required fishing wires, and a tool to do so, since he didn't have one with him, he had to cut an excessive amount of holes in the wall. These holes then need to be patched/sanded and eventually the whole wall painted. This would not have been necessary, or at the very least severely reduced if he had the proper tools with him.
2) Even though I'm downtown within 10 minutes of a hardware store, Sal left in the middle of the day to get materials and was gone for nearly 2 hours. These were materials that again, he should have picked up on the way to the job, and I was charged 2 hours of labor + the cost of materials which were actually barely used and he took them with him at the end of the day, so approximately 25% of the total bill and $200+ of my money for this excursion.
3) Overall the pace of work was slow. Multiple trips down to the truck, etc.. all at $70/hour. The time he spent packing up his tools and chatting at the end of the day were also charged.
All this combined meant I could see this being spun into a multi day, multi thousand dollar job when it shouldn't have been.
When GDR contacted me to schedule another day of work I replied with the issues I had, in a very respectful and reasonable as above. I fully expected we could resolve them and finish the job. Reducing the bill for the 2 hours of getting materials, sending a different worker, I was really open to anything at that point.
It took a full week for any response which was that they wanted to discuss it on the phone. I sent my phone number, after a few times back and forth, I never received a single call or text or attempt to contact me.
When their accounting starting following up to pay the bill, I did. I once again, re-iterated my issues and received a reply from GDR stating (SIC):
"There has been alot of ongoing issues since this pandemic and everyone took a hit wether it was financially or mentally. We apologize for the miscommunication and we are looking into this issue, Thank you for addressing this! "
Essentially a completely empty/useless reply.
I am sympathetic to challenges during the pandemic, we are all dealing with this, but it's completely unprofessional to simply put this on the customer without any responsibility. To make no attempt whatsoever to discuss or address my issues let alone take any responsibility for them. They are sending people out to do jobs, billing their hours at a profit, they should be taking some responsibility for the quality and value of the work that is done. But they didn’t, at all.
So I moved on, I hired a contractor directly a freelance site instead. The contractor contacted me in advance of the job to confirm everything and make sure they had the necessary tools and supplies (including the tool for fishing wires!). They finished the job which was probably less than half done for just over $200 all in. The contrast of efficiency of work and professionalism and value was so vastly different from GDR that I reached out to GDR one last time to say that I genuinely felt ripped off by the work that was done and what I was charged.
This final contact was completely ignored (I sent it 4 days ago).
Very disappointing to have such a complete lack of effort or any kind of after sales service, I can only say I'm glad to have not thrown good money after bad continuing to work with this company.
