Hello [removed member name]. I’m sorry that you were upset enough to give such a review after all of the steps that we took to try to help you with your re-roof project. We strive to do the best we can to make everybody happy and keep our reviews top-notch. However, as they say, there are always two sides to a story. I am happy to be able to relate our side. First of all, I’m wondering how grades of one ‘B,’ one ‘C’ and one ‘D’ can average out to an overall grade of ‘D’? Regarding the ‘C’ grade in ‘Price,’ we are usually middle-of-the-road amongst the competition; we are rarely the least expensive and rarely the highest bid. We are up front about that on our website and in verbally speaking with our clients. However, Steven’s quality and attention to detail is higher than most. Regarding the ‘D’ grade in Professionalism, I am quite perplexed by this! You may be basing this on my mistake made in telling you that Steven would want to pass on to you the increase in materials cost, at no markup and no labor increase -- this is standard business protocol for us, and I had forgotten that I had previously said that we would not do that in your case. I can understand your original uneasiness, but all you had to do was remind me that we had said we would not pass it on, and we would have held to our previous statement. As it turned out, it wasn’t going to happen anyway because we were successfully able to order the material before September 1st. If you are basing the ‘D’ grade on the Title 24 issue, all I can say is that we do things by the book and follow the laws of the State of California with regard to licensing and roofing. Based on your zip code, you are in Climate Zone 12. That zone must comply with the new requirements of Section 6 ("Cool Roofs") of the 2013 California Energy Commission Building Energy Efficiency Standards (Title 24) which took effect on July 1, 2014. Each county and city is responsible for its own enforcement of that law. Every city we have dealt with so far is enforcing it, yet it seems that the County of Contra Costa is not. I will admit that we did not ask them if they were, and made the wrong assumption. However, the compliance measures included in our revised bid was proper according to the State of California. Regardless, I am happy for you that you were able to get by without complying as this Title 24, Section 6 is truly a headache and significant extra expense. Regarding the ‘B’ grade in ‘Responsiveness,’ I’m not sure how much more responsive we could have been. Every one of your emails was returned the same day with the exceptions of a 25-hours-later response on July 25th, and a couple of overnight replies. Every one of your phone calls was either answered on the spot or returned the same day. Steven invested a lot of time making several trips out to your place to speak with you about your roof and gutter options, and was never late to an appointment. Regarding the delays in being able to install your roof, the responsiveness (or lack thereof) goes two ways: We had a series of emails from July 8, 2013 to July 22, 2013 with mine being the last. Then on July 25, 2013 at 2:14pm, you wrote “Ok, back to this---- sorry for dragging on so long. We have been busy with other things lately. We are leaning heavily towards having you do the job here at the $26835 that you verbally quoted over the phone. My wife and I leave Sunday for the next 9 weeks so that would put us to the end of September. Before we say yes I would like to get the number for some references we could check? If all is good could we secure the project now for when we return?” In my emailed response on July 25th at 4:20pm (two hours later), I did attach more references for you and said “If all is good, as you say, YES, you can procure the project for your return. I would just need to draw up the contract for your review, signature and return.” Forty minutes later (5:01pm), you asked for more recent references, and unfortunately I was unable to respond until 6:05pm (25 hours) the following evening. (I am quite often away from my computer for long stretches as I do go out and help Steven on his repairs.) I apologized for the delay in response and, having no more recent references because we had done only repairs in the previous year, gave you a list of older references instead, stating, “Sometimes our clients would rather see older references so they can find out how our roofs have held up over the years since they were installed.” At this point, we did not hear back from you: no date was procured, no contract was drawn up, no deal was made. We thought that you had decided against using us because we could not give you the more recent references. We did not try to hold a spot for you because we had no feedback from you and no signed contract. Business went on as usual with a full calendar of repairs, getting busier as time went by and Fall (the “rainy season”) was coming. The next time we heard from you was on October 3, 2013 at 4:04pm: “We are finally back from our time in Hawaii and ready to get the roof started. I was calling the references you sent my wife and they are pretty old. Do you have anything more recent that I could use?” On October 4th at 11:30am (the next morning, 19 hours later), I reminded you about the email I had sent you on July 26th and the fact that we had no more recent references. I then stated, “This is the first year in our 11 years of business that we did not do any re-roofs through the summer (other than a wood-shake guard shack/entranceway for a homeowners association). We have been so busy with repairs that we had no need to try to sell any re-roofs to carry us through to the normal busy repair season. In fact, our repairs schedule has put us in a situation that we don't like to be in: one where we need to decline to do any re-roofs until this coming Spring. Our current calendar is already booked with repairs through the first week of November, running 7 days a week! If we waited until November to do a re-roof, the days are too short, with moisture in the morning, and the rainy season is set to begin. If you are willing to wait until Spring, we could revisit the situation and be happy to help you! What are your thoughts?” To which we received no response from you. Once again, we thought you were no longer interested. Jump forward to July 5th, 2014. We received another email from you, looking to see if we would do the re-roof for what we had quoted you the previous year. However, the roofing industry had received 20%+ in materials increases over the past year, and the new requirements of Title 24, Section 6 had gone into effect. We gave you a revised bid with an increase in the scope of work. With the new information and the price increase, it is understandable that you had more questions and needed to do further research. However, that took time, and our calendar kept being filled with other work. Hence the delay into September, and then you decided you didn’t want us to do the work in your absence and canceled the contract. As you mentioned, we were gracious enough to accept that with only the request for reimbursement for the permit, and we did not even charge you the $400 cancellation fee that the contract terms would have allowed. Thank you for the opportunity to assist you, and I’m sorry it did not work out between us. -- Julie Landeros