Fountain Pools & Water Features

This is absolutely the worst contractor experience I have ever had. I was told 6-8 months. I am now almost a year and they have no idea when it will be completed. My sales Rep quit or was fired and I was not assigned another rep. I have been through several production mgrs all promising the world. I have no advocate inside the company and no one seems to want to keep the commitments made to me. I was very clear that the pool was to provide my 82 year old mother a way to exercise. The pool was not designed properly and now they want more money to fix their error.I currently have trouble even getting someone to talk to me about it. I would not recommend this company to anyone. I have attached a picture of what I have after $70,000 and almost a year later. Buyer be ware I don't know how they don't have a ton of bad reviews. To this day I have no date of completion.

#1 worst company I have ever done business with in my life! It took them almost 12 months to complete my pool and still didn't finish the tile on our fountain. They wanted more money after finally responding to us about it. Customer service is non existent. I could go on about several issues I had with them. They just don't care about their customers. RuN from this company.

After months and months of stress and frustration, we finally have a gorgeous pool that passed all inspections (barely). That’s the good part. Getting to this point by working with Fountain Pools was a nightmare. When we chose to go with Fountain Pools, we were encouraged by the good reviews on Google. However, we should have gone to Yelp first. Those reviews are pretty much spot on (especially the one from Dan S.). If you choose to have Fountain Pools build your pool, you WILL have to be “that customer” in order to get anything done. We didn’t want to go there, but if we didn’t, I 100% think we’d still be sitting here with a hole in the ground a year after signing the contract. Getting a lawyer involved also helped. Communication is horrible, nothing is their fault, and they repeatedly tell you (in so many words) that you are an idiot not capable of possibly understanding anything about building a pool. There’s so much we could write here, it would probably be best to share it in list form: Pros - Sub-contractors where generally very good (with the exception of the ones that jimmied the lock on our side gate to let themselves in) - The Fountain Pools work crew (Lou’s crew) was amazing, we called them the “A-Team” - A beautiful completed pool Cons - We signed the contract in November and we didn’t break ground until March, we had to take it into our own hands to get the permits cleared with the county (Jessica in permitting with Fountain just kept giving us excuses) along with us threatening to cancel the contract. Once we moved forward, a kind soul recommended we get a timeline in writing for when things would be completed along with a completion date (best thing we did). - Luckily I was able to catch a measurement error on the original plans from the sales guy, if I didn’t, who knows what would have happened. - They constantly complained about having to drive to our location (we are in Tampa and they are in ***** Gorda). And also complained about not knowing how Hillsborough county permitting worked. - Things would get scheduled and then no one would show up. Or workers would show without prior notification that anyone was supposed to be coming. - There was a big tree in our yard the entire time everyone was there measuring and planning, nothing was ever said until one day when they realized that it had to be removed THAT DAY or the timeline would be seriously affected (not sure how they missed it the entire time). - None of the dirt was removed from our yard after the initial dig, which means we had to stare at huge 8’-9’ mounds of dirt for over 2 months. - Adding to the dirt not being removed, they called us to schedule our interior finish but told us that the final draw had to be paid before the spray (this is the final step in the pool process and we still had dirt in our yard…and lots of it). The contract states nothing about having to pay the final draw before the interior finish is sprayed. Final payment was wanted but there was still work to be completed. Threats were made from Steve, the owner, about not completing the pool. - Left over rubble from the decking and paver base sat out in front of our house for weeks. - We were constantly talked down to by our project manager Ray. From not picking the right color decking, and not adding a screen enclosure to having the audacity to tell us “we are not pool builders” when an error was caught by telling him that the pvc was not hooked to the skimmer on the day they were shooting the gunite. He told us it was hooked up. Spoiler alert, the A team had to chisel out a bunch of gunite because the skimmer was not hooked up. - We had to purchase the chemicals for start up. The guy that was supposed to do it never showed. When we sent Steve the bill we were never reimbursed. - Final grade was not done correctly. Water was everywhere. We had to make them come back and fix the drainage easement that we constantly told Ray needed to stay cleared. - Fountain drug their feet on everything that needed to be done for inspections for the permit to be cleared. - During final inspections for the permit we were told that a termite certificate was needed and should have been completed before gunite was ever shot. I had to find a termite company to complete this. Fountain never did. - Pool was completed May 4, inspections finally cleared August 30….almost 10 months after signing the contract. To sum things up, we had to be the squeaky wheel. Had we not been and had we not hired an attorney, I honestly do not think we would have a completed pool. From the get go Fountain took no initiative to get our pool started and/or completed. And the constant lack of communication and belittling by staff when we would finally get ahold of someone is maddening.

very happy

Great job so far.

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