Ltw Builders

It was terrible. It started out great because Lindsay Warren promised us the moon and for what we thought was a very reasonable price. But once we signed the contracts and deposited money with him, we soon realized that Lindsay was not to be trusted. For starters, he was rarely on the job site. My wife and I would randomly stop in to see how construction was progressing, and he was almost never there when we arrived. His crew was often rude to us and they kept the work site extremely messy, throwing their garbage all over the land and inside the house and smoking inside the house, It was embarrassing to bring friends and family to the site because there was trash everywhere. But our problems with Lindsay as a builder were much worse than a messy work site. His communication skills were very poor, he couldn't consistently keep us apprised of what was going on at the construction site, and he couldn't help us properly plan the project at all in advance. As a result, we were constantly being surprised by "fire drills" that were happening on our project site which weren't planned, e.g. work that was being done that we hadn't approved or agreed to. Many times when this happened, we had to pay out of our pockets to fix his mistakes at significant cost to us in the form of change orders. We came to believe over time that he actually had very little knowledge of what he was doing relative to other sophisticated builders, but instead he largely relied on his subcontractors and other vendors for their expertise. In my opinion, a lot of the mistakes happened probably because he just wasn't aware of what was going on at the job site. And this is one reason he couldn't answer a lot of our questions. We also began to catch him in one lie after another, and soon we found we couldn't trust a single word he said. He was increasingly unresponsive to our requests, and despite repeated pleas from us for better communication and planning on his part, he refused, and his terrible customer service skills actually got worse. The only thing that he was ever good at was pestering us for money. My wife and I remarked to each other that he counted ourselves lucky if he would respond to only one out of every 4 or 5 emails that we sent him, but if he needed us to write him a check for something he was johnny on the spot, texting, calling and emailing us non-stop. Finally over the summer of 2013, we were contacted by another client of his who had previously acted as a reference for Lindsay, prior to actually moving into his house. This client told us how after he moved in, his family encountered one problem after another with the poorly constructed home that Lindsay sold them, including leaks that he suffered the first night in his new home when he flushed the toilet! This client's accounts of Lindsay were very similar to our experiences - deceptive, uncommunicative, unresponsive, etc. And a year after moving into the home, this client told us that Lindsay still refused to fix all of the problems that his workers had caused at the house. We were noticing Lindsay cutting corners more and more on our project, and we started to dig deeper into his billing practices. We immediately found that he was trying to charge us in full for work that he hadn't completed, or to charge in part or in full for work that in some cases he hadn't even begun. In many instances he had already billed us 100% of the budget for items that weren't anywhere close to completion. In one instance, he tried to bill us charges for a pool, and he hadn't even received a permit to build the pool yet, let alone even break ground on it! What's worse, when we started to question his billing practices, he stormed off the job and refused to bring his crew back to work. When we showed him that he had over-charged us, and after he had agreed to a proper charge for his work, he let his crew return to the site - unfortunately this was after our house had been sitting vacant for over a month! Then, only a few days after returning to work, he hit us with another outrageous bill for work that he either hadn't done or had done improperly or incompletely. When we questioned the bill and asked him to provide customary back-up documentation (invoices, etc) so that we could pay him for work that he had actually performed correctly and completely, he refused! He then promptly removed his entire crew and all their equipment, leaving our house vacant yet again. The last time we saw him on the job was October of 2013. Our house was supposed to be completed by September 2013, and it will likely now not be done until June of 2014 at the earliest because of his behavior and how he left us in the lurch. We've had to spend a lot of money on lawyers and consultants and have had to go through the painful experience of watching our dream house lie fallow for months on end while no work was being done, all the while paying additional rent while we waited for resolution with Lindsay. And we had to go through the arduous process of finding and hiring another builder to come in and clean up the mess that Lindsay left at our property. Now that we have engaged other builders, we have realized what an amateur Lindsay really was compared to all the other wonderful, experienced builders we have met in town. He likes to associate himself with Wadia in Greenwich and he used this as a selling tactic to gain us as a client, but we've since been told by others that Wadia wants no association with Lindsay whatsoever. Who knows what his relationship with Wadia is, but regardless, you don't have to go far to hear bad reviews of Lindsay's work and his character. Just ask any vendor, sub-contractor, or supplier in town who has dealt with him in the past - we did, and what we heard back were a lot of comments about how awful his reputation is. We've been told that he tries to buy broken equipment, that he is well known for cutting corners, and for using the cheapest materials wherever possible on the homes he builds. Or ask around at the Building Department to see what they say about him. We can't find a good reference for him anywhere in town, aside from his Broker at Raveis who continues to pitch him to new clients, even though she knows what a mess he has created for people like our family and the others who shared their experiences with us. Now we are in a situation where for the last year he totally ruined our dream of building a new house and made our lives miserable in the process. He walked off the job in breach our contract, leaving our house in disarray and uncompleted, even after we paid him millions of dollars. On top of that, he also walked off with our deposits for fixtures and other items that we now can't take possession of. He drew money from us or our bank for things like appliances and plumbing fixtures, but he now refuses to hand over or release those deposits to us. To add insult to injury, in an effort to extract even more money out of us, he is threatening us with legal action to boot! He paints himself as this friendly neighborhood builder, and calls himself a "pussycat", but don't be fooled, he's anything but the sort. We never dreamed someone who lives and works in a town like New Canaan and who has a family in this town would treat his customers the way he treated us, but apparently that someone does exist and it's Lindsay Warren. We are just thankful that the other homeowners who were mistreated by him spoke up to us, and we hope that he doesn't bring harm to any more unsuspecting families in town who are just trying to pursue their dream of building their own home.