DAN'S ON THE LEVEL CARPENTRY

The work started well. Dan is a congenial person. One morning, my wife and I walked outside the front door to enter the porch which looked and felt lilke a cage: the railings were very tall as required by the new building codes. Dan never communicated to us about this. We asked Dan to obtain a variance and restore the railing to their historical height. Which he did. Then, when he removed the shingles from the roof of the porch, he had to reinforce the roof with plywood and asked me to pay extra for the plywood. Then, when he installed the gutters, he asked me if I wanted wooden gutters at an extra cost of $1000. I agreed. Now comes the reason I am writing this, and it was not apparent in 2002 when the work was done. The steps leading up to the porch have railings sloping up on each side of the steps. The railings are made of wood. The railings are screwed to the posts of the porch at the top of the steps and each railing is screwed to a post at the bottom of the steps. The two posts at the bottom of the steps stood firmly when delivered as, I discovered, each sinks into the ground about atwo feet and are connected together by two 2x6 pressure treated boards. The boards and the feet of the post are burried into the wet ground. The posts are made of 4x4 pieces of fur encassed into four vertical boards nailed into the 4x4. To accomodate the bottom steps, the 4x4 are partially cut and the remaining section is about 2x2. As the humidity is constantly pumped into the posts, they have broken twice, and I have replaced them twice since April 2002, when the work was originally performed. They need to be replaced a third time. Actually, if someone leaned on one of the post at the bottom of the steps today, it would probably break. But after several years of humidity, the rot has spread to boards of the the bottom steps and into the railings. As the historical commission compels the use of wood, the only way fix this problem for good is to dig two holes in the ground and pour concrete under each of the roted posts, change the posts and anchor the new posts with metal brackets to the concrete, thus keeping them from roting again. This is what should have been done by Dan in the first place. I believe they knew the posts would rot, but cut their cost at my expense. Their behavior was dishonest. Tough I did agree to pay it then, I now apply the same adjective to the pricing of $16,000, and this for work done in 2002. Overall, Dan presented himself as someone able to restore the porch to it original historic state. This is a goal Dan and his coworker did not have the ability to achieve. Overall, the porch is pretty rough work, far from resembling the work of the carpenters who built the porch. Something about me, so that you can judge my judgment above. I have worked on the old house for 25 years. I could now build my own house today. I do not seek perfection, but know when my work is well done. So do I the work of others.