Towne Construction Group LLC.

At first I was accepting of Towne Construction’s work. They did not run an additional electric line to support additional lighting added to the kitchen, but merely tapped into the line for the microwave. Now, every time I run the microwave the lights in the kitchen and dinette dim with each cycle of the microwave. Truly annoying but I accepted their explanation that it would require a new circuit box with larger capacity. Another electrician has now contradicted that. In addition, the bathtub plumbing leaked, which they had to replace. Then, a few months later the grouting in our master bath had to be replaced because it was falling out. Two months after that the grout in the kitchen was doing the same. The ceilings along the tape lines in the rooms where they pulled down the popcorn ceilings had to be repaired as they were cracking out (we hired another contractor to do this). Now, we find that they did not properly level the dinette floor when installing the tile, choosing instead to “build up” the floor under the installed surface tiles with 1-3 layers of the same tile packed in underneath. Of course this flooring had to be replaced—-the new contractor actually taking pictures of this sub-standard work because he had never seen anything like it! As far as I am concerned, this group has COST us money with all of the rework we have had to do over the last few years!

Instead, working with Mike was nightmarishly surreal: written floor plans and pictures of cabinetry sent to Mike never seemed to make it to the guys on the job. This resulted in almost every single task done onsite having to be redone. To add insult to injury, Mike often billed me for change orders for work that had to be redone due to contractor error or was included in the original contract. When I say that tasks had to be redone, I mean that walls were constructed in the wrong places and had to be torn down and rebuilt. A soffit was constructed, then torn down and rebuilt because it was the wrong size. A hole made in a wall to accommodate a new doorway had to be patched and another made in the correct place for the door. A built in bookcase had to be torn out and rebuilt because the original one was nothing like the picture I had provided as the example. Paint – very expensive paint – was applied over peeling wallpaper. The painted wallpaper could literally be stripped away by hand. Example after example of tasks that had to be redone. Of course, the job wasn’t completed on time or under budget, even accounting for the incorrectly billed work. And those bills for change orders! Those included tile work done in the master bathroom and on the stairs and the disposal fee for waste – all included in the original contract. There were other issues too: no one showing up for work at the last moment, a leak causing damage to the ceiling below, and too many others to list. Things finally came to a head when the workers were pulled off the job for reasons I didn’t understand. You can imagine how disturbing this was to me: I had paid Mike as provided in my contract, but workers were not on the job because – as I now understand - the subcontractor and Mike were having a spat. What Mike had done was very clever: Mike made a contract with me to do the work, then subcontracted it out to a man I had never met. The reason my floor and cabinet plans weren’t properly carried out on the first try is that Mike was not onsite doing or supervising the work and he had never forwarded the plans to the people who were. The subcontractor doing the work was having his own troubles with Mike. So my advice to anyone considering working the Mike Towne or Towne Construction is to BEWARE. This man, while capable of doing good work, NOW makes money by securing contracts with unsuspecting homeowners and then subcontracting them to others – people the homeowner may have never met - for a lower fee. In my case, Mike Towne did NO QUALITY CONTROL, NO PLANNING, NO TIME MANAGEMENT, and HE DID NOT LOOK OUT FOR MY INTERESTS AS THE HOMEOWNER. Save yourself trouble: look elsewhere for a contractor.

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