GOULART MASONRY & CONCRETE

GM&C designed and poured the concrete and did the brick work. The project was delayed by weather and unfortunately the forms were finalized and the concrete poured while we were overseas on a business trip. While the brickwork was fine, the design itself did not meet our expectations and did not offer the improvements in ease of movement which were the original purpose of the project. The steps were of variable height, (awkward to walk on), and the transitions were not improved as expected. The new driveway slope was different enough that our cars began scraping as we entered the garage. GM&C made offers to replace portions of the driveway work at their cost and asked us to pay more money to get to where we believed we should have been originally. After several difficult months of trying to work out an equitable arrangement for replacement of the work we finally had a new contractor tear out the GM&C work when it became apparent that the emotions were a barrier to moving forward. Each of the three contractors we asked to bid the replacement job agreed that the driveway work was unacceptable and to be correct required complete replacement and strongly encouraged us to replace the walk way and add features to make the steps safer and less awkward. The second version was designed and supervised by a landscape architect, (lesson learned!), and was done with less expensive finaish materials since we were at that point way over budget having paid for the project once already. GM&C has been around for a long time and probably does good work...they just blew it this time around. If you use them be certain to have a drawing and have everything in writing.