AL SPICER TERRAZZO MARBLE TILE GROUT RESTORE

The project took 3 weeks rather than 5-6 days. His crew were barely literate in English; I knew I couldn't understand them, nor could they understand me very well, except for the word "NO!" which I had to utter more often than I would have liked. Mr. Spicer, knowing well his crew and its limitations of skill as well as language, provided extremely lax project management. If I hadn't been working from home and checking on the crew's progress myself, far more would have gone wrong than did. As it was, these were the problems: They crew failed to read the work order regarding the tile/bullnose baseboard replacement. By the time I discovered their error, they had tiled the floor up to the old wood baseboard. This is not my first floor tiling job, and I have NEVER before seen a skilled tile installer fail to remove the baseboards, tile flush up to the wall, and then replace the baseboards above the tile (or if they're in too bad shape, tell the client to obtain new baseboards). The crew then tore out the wall-side row of tile all the way around, and did as instructed. Spicer admitted that "they just didn't read the work order." When the baseboard tile was installed, they installed only the bullnose, not the lower course of 6" tile as I'd intended. Maybe Spicer misunderstood me; maybe I expected that a person with his experience would know that, with all the tile I had on hand and the standard style of such baseboards, it should be 2 courses -- 6" topped by bullnose. In any case, I left that defect stay. By then, I just wanted his crew to be done and out of my house. They left filthy tracks from the garage, through my house and master bedroom to the bath, failing to put down the standard heavy brown paper that contractors usually use. The 1" tile on the shower floor is installed unevenly. You can see a "ripple" where one square mat of tiles was not aligned properly with the one next to it, and underfoot, you can feel tiles that are higher than those around them. When Spicer brought one of his crew back to finally seal the grout, he had to micro-manage the process, reminding the worker to perform the necessary wipe-up steps. The plumbing is yet another horror story. First, the crew failed to recognize and use the hardware properly for the shower head fixture and hand-held shower "cable" and head, resulting in the hand-held shower head being able to point only horizontally at the back wall of the shower rather than down onto the person showering. They had already wasted an hour going to Home Depot to find what they said was "an extender," so I know they realized that that shower head installation was wrong. Worse, they lied to me about having "done it" and to Mr. Spicer about my having told them that I wanted the shower head to "fit close." I complained; the next day, Mr. Spicer, having found the part they didn't recognize in the box the shower head kit had come in, fixed it himself. Five minutes. They could have called him as soon as they realized they were getting something wrong, and he could have told them what to look for (right in the box in front of them), and I'd never have known about their lack of plumbing knowledge ... until later, that is. After the grout had dried and been sealed, and I actually took a shower, I found that the hot and cold water lines had been reversed in the single-lever controller. Once again, I called Spicer. Oh, said he, they'd known they did that and told him they had fixed it. Yeah ... NO! So he came out again, turned the water line piece 180 degrees, and caulked the cover back in place. But wait, there's more .... The glass block wall's last vertical row before the opening was build of plain, square-edged block, rather than the rounded-edge (D-shaped) blocks normally used to finish the "doorway" side of such walls. So, to "finish" that edge of the glass wall, I had to purchase more bullnose tile, in a complementary shade because my original tiles were no longer in production. At that point, again, I just wanted the job done and them gone. I found out later that any proficient tile professional would have been able to cut 14 of my existing 6" porcelain tiles to 4" wide bullnosed on both sides, and finished the block wall edge with that. Of course, a proficient craftsman would have used glass D-block on that edge and not needed more tile. I'm having another company correct the baseboard treatment as that's the only mistake that is so bad I can't bear to look at it every day. I know the market is bad. I know it's hard for contractors to get work and keep good subs. But this kind of customer disservice is unnecessary. If you know your crew is inefficient and insufficiently skilled to work unsupervised, supervise them! I'd rather have been told that the project would have to wait until he could find true journeymen level craftspeople. At least it would have been done right the first time!