Southwest Design LLC

Mr Dennis Cleary was referred to us as the person who built the door currently on our home; he previously lived in our neighborhood and was recommended by a neighbor. On Nov. 27, 2012, we signed a contract for the new door to be built and paid him the full price in advance, total of $2,500. The terms of the contract were "approximately 90 working days." The door is beautiful, heavy steel, bronze powder coating, lovely scroll design and no complaints about the door. But after the first 90 working days passed, we began to contact him. He said he had a backlog of work, etc. As we got into the second set of 90 work days, sometime in April, 2013, he injured his hand seriously,. and we understood that, but hoped that somebody in his employment would help out. We kept in contact with him through April, May, June and July of 2013---we were now well over 180 days of time, and in plain "calendar days," almost 8 months had passed since we paid him for the door., yet we had nothing. We just gave up pushing it because we had a door that worked on the property, and frankly, we gave up pushing it. Then in August Mr Cleary delivered the door, and over a period of another couple weeks the job was completed, with minor time delays while he waited for minor details like the new doorbell (he removed our old one when he removed the wood frame to install the new door); he left our property almost 9 months after we paid for the door, with doorbell wires hanging loose at front of house, AND when he delivered the door, he offered this info: "the guys didn't powdercoat over the interior silver screws, I'm going to get on them for that; I'll come back to touch that up"...so we basically had a dark bronze/black screen facing into the house with over 50 or so bright silver screw heads not matching. He never followed up to do that touch up painting once the door was installed. We also never heard back from him on replacing the doorbell. Bottom line: the contractor did not live up to his own contract "approx. 90 days" and went over that time limit almost by 3 times, and the door wasn't completely powder coated. We finally emailed him and said we'd get our own doorbell and buy some paint to touch up the silver screw heads. We didn't even get a reply after that. We would not use this contractor again, for any sort of work. He obviously knows how to build a quality door, but either he can't control his workload, or takes on too much work himself, and that leaves the customer waiting for almost 9 months for a door I could have had installed in 1 month from other area suppliers I talked to later. Recommend nobody use this contractor. We won't ever again.