DANIEL STUCCOWORKS

Richard the owner originally appeared as an agreeable, pleasant guy. He knows his business unfortunately he doesn't expect quality from his workers. I asked the lath installers not to lean their materials against the new wall cap because it was fragile. They didn't listen and leaned materials against the wall which scratched the wall cap. They also badly scratched the threshold at my front door with the wire lath. It had been sealed and covered with thick cardboard for months after the new installation. They literally gauged it within 30 seconds after removing the protective cardboard. I pointed this out to them and they said it was like that even though the scratched it right in front of me. I had to sand and re-urethane seal the front threshold which took me 3 hours. The lathers misted the required stapling in numerous areas. The inspector caught this and they had to come back to install the required code stapling requirements. His main stucco guy knows what he is doing but did what's easy. The other workers were mostly made up of young day workers. The workers never used a darby to level the stucco. A darby is a long trowel used to make sure the stucco base coat is applied evenly. Otherwise what ends up happening is the stucco is applied unevenly. A skilled mason that was working at my house on another project visually noticed how uneven the stucco had been applied. He got a long straight edge out of his vehicle and showed me peaks and valley that varied by as much as an inch. When I called it to Richard's attention he got angry and very defensive yet he made no effort to have his guys correct the uneven application of the base coat. The workers also plastered my block walls with stucco. After their first attempt I could clearly see every row of block in the wall. Richard tried to write it off as lighting hitting the wall at a specific angle. He begrudging re-plastered the wall when I sent him photos demonstrating that it was not due to a specific time of day. Richard estimated the materials needed for the custom color synthetic stucco. I paid for the material upon delivery as part of our agreement. The only problem was he ordered nearly 2/3 more material than what was needed. When I asked him about it he said, "don't worry, I can use it later." He missed the fact that his horrible estimate of materials cost me over a thousand dollars of custom colored stucco material. The finish coat was applied sloppily in several areas. When the workers left they didn?t bother to pick up all of the paper they used or clean up the material that was spilled on the ground. When the project was complete I went to put the plastic inserts in the metal openings for the foundation vents. They didn't fit. I found out that what the workers should have done was wrap the plastic insert with protective plastic to maintain the size and shape of the metal frames that held the decorative plastic inserts. The workers had removed the decorative inserts while plastering the base coat. They tossed them in the dirt around my house and I collected them before they were destroyed by being stepped on. Richard refused to make any corrective repair so the inserts could be installed. I contacted another contractor to make repairs. He agreed that this was a rookie mistake and noted that the depth of the base coat was inadequate. (see photo) He said the base coat should have been at least 3/4 of an inch which it clearly was not.