Juan Orlando Gomez

On 2/15/14 this architect came to our house to discuss what we wanted to accomplish which is an addition of between 800 and 1100 sq. ft.. On that day we gave him a personal check as the initial retainer, he said he?d visit the County after our check cleared the bank which would be after 2/19 and he?d report back to us. When days and days passed and he had not contacted us, we contacted him 2-3 times until he gave us a brief update. He told us he?d have some sketches ready for our review and we?d be able to make changes to those sketches. Between that time and 3/27/14 this architect replied to only one of our numerous emails and to one of our phone calls asking for project status. It?s very disheartening to a paying client to dish out $1,800, anxiously await the next step of the project and receive nothing in return. He continued to disregard all our attempts to contact him and came up with lame excuses, one, that his computer had been down, two, that he had been hospitalized. We refuse to accept these excuses and, if indeed his computer was down or he was hospitalized, someone within his business should have found a way to communicate with clients, retrieve emails and phone messages and not blatantly ignore clients. Then, again, he operates out of his apartment. On 3/27 we finally corralled him for an appt. at our house from 4:30 p.m. on, we rushed home from work and sat in our living room with the blinds open waiting to see him drive up. Almost 2 hours later he had not shown up, at that time we went to another part of our very small house to take care of laundry and when we went out our front door 15 minutes later we were astonished to find two sets of architectural plans attached to our front door! This man has our cell phone number, our house has a working doorbell. His excuse? He called us at a number he had for us (not the cell # from which I?ve called him countless times) and a recording or text told him we were at the Youth Fair so when he got to our house he looked thru the blinds, saw no one there and assumed we were not at home and, thus, he didn?t call or ring the bell. We wasted 6 weeks of valuable time due to this man?s nonsense and lack of business ethic. He just doesn?t return phone calls or emails, he has not yet joined all of us in the year 2014. Buyer beware: Had I done the research I should have done before I hired him, I?d have seen his 2004 Florida DPR license suspension and would not have hired him. Stay away unless you want a lot of grief. The only thing I can say that?s positive is that he returned the retainer in full even though I asked him to keep $200 for the useless drawings he provided and the time he spent at our house. He kept asking for the return of the two plans in order to refund the retainer, I don't know why this insistence on the return of the plans since he had the originals! Has he ever heard of copiers?