R & K Home Improvement

june of '14 we responded to an ad left on our door. after a lot of conversation, we decided to hire robert to roof our house & garage, also soffit work. the house was to have a tear off, shingled and the garage metal-roofed. he was a longtime waterloo resident and was working on a house down the st. also had done nice work on a house near us. he stated that he had a crew, which we found out later that were only for the tear-off. otherwise it was mainly him and another man. if he had told us it was only going to be him, we never would have hired him. very misleading. july 8th, he had us pay for materials and 1/2 his labor. he stated that was how business was done. the start date was 8/15. materials for the garage were delivered to our driveway in late july, the rest were delivered to HIS home who knows when. the garage materials sat in our drive way for 3 months until my husband (w/2 knee replace.) moved them himself. each month we had to get ahold of him, inquire as to the start date and was always put off. he kept promising 2 week increments. he did, however, come and throw a bunch of tarps in the yard when he saw a new furnace being put in. august passed, sept passed, oct passed. he kept giving us excuses as to why the work had not started yet. finally mid nov (first recorded snowfall was 11/21) he wanted to bring things over. (ie: not have to park his truck and trailer at his house.) but who wants construction material in their yard over the winter? our home had already become a storage unit for him. at this point we told him to stop everything,,we were consulting our lawyer. thru our lawyers we gave him the option of giving him may/june of '15 to complete the job, since the building permit was good for a year. he refused. HE said there was too much animosity by that time. well, who wouldn't be upset that it took months waiting for work to get done with no communication? summer of 15-we finally found someone that would pick up our materials that were delivered to robert's, and do our roofs. the job was done in 3 days. we also discovered robert had over ordered enough materials to do 2 garage roofs. now we have the metal that was supposed to be for the garage, plus the 8 packs of extra shingles, and 17 extra sheets of plywood sitting in our back yard. we lost money on the over-purchasing of the materials, lawyer fees, he refunded only part of his labor because he had put a tarp over the roof. not only was our yard and driveway a mess for months, the inside dividing wall between our upstairs bedrooms started to discolor and peel in the winter after his tarp had blown away. this whole thing has cost us alot of money, aggravation and stress. the biggest mistake was not getting an ending date in writing. huge lesson learned from this fiasco.