ZINDER CONTRACTING LLC

Seth's pricing was slightly higher than that of the only other serious quote I received for the job. He was great at the contracting stage, providing quick updates to the contract, and he fit my job in quickly. I also liked that he agreed (for $100) to add me as addititional insured on his insurance. Seth and his assistant did decent work on the downstairs vanity and wall cabinet install, but on the upstairs install they made a couple of careless mistakes that would have taken only 5 minutes for them to fix at the time, but that now cannot be fixed at all, and they did a terrible job on making the angle cuts for the mirror frames around my mirrors. The vanity install included installing 2 inch quartzite countertops (a somewhat delicate material) with undermount sinks and plumbing hookup. The plumbing hookup seems to be okay, but they failed to shim the upstairs cabinets to make them level, and as a result the 2 cm quartzite on top of them is bowed down in the middle and there's a gap between that and the backsplash piece. Also, they didn't pull forward the countertop the 1/8 of an inch that they needed to on the wall side in order to make it flush with the backsplash in the front. On the downstairs vanity, they also left an unnecessary gap below the countertop, not a huge deal, but visible from the sofa in the den. On the mirror frames, which had been painstakingly created by manually routing out the backs of a bunch of boards for more than 3 hours and only needed to have their ends cut off with 45 degree angles, they made the cuts crooked and cut some of the pieces too short, so that the I had to have someone else cut straighten them out and rout them out more and they could no longer go flush with the vanity on the bottom side as intended. There were a couple of parts of the installation that turned out to be harder than Seth had expected - one was that it turned out I had forgotten that the end panel would not go all the way to the floor, which threw off my measurement for the width of the cabinets. To his credit, Seth did inform me of that issue, but he was entirely unhelpful in finding a solution. I am also a bit to blame at this part, because the measurement issue was my fault, and I at first told Seth to handle the issue in one way but then reconsidered and asked him to change it. However, when I asked for the change, he refused, and told me it was not possible, but it turned out that it was possible after all - I found out that it was possible because he did something else wrong and so he ended up having to redo that part of the job anyways due to his own mistake. I would not have objected had he said it would cost more to redo the work, but to just tell me it was impossible was a lie. Seth also contracted to do the electrical work for which he was clearly not qualified. I had assumed he would bring an electriian for the lighting installations, but he did not, and then he told me that my wiring for dual vanity lights didn't work even though electricians have since confirmed to me that my wiring works and was done exactly the way it is usually done. Seth simply didn't understand how vanity lights are supposed to be wired. When he ran into difficulties with the lighting installations he claimed that it was "not my fault" that he didn't get any of the lighting / wiring portions of the job completed, with his argument being that my wiring was wrong/difficult, even though it was not wrong and he should not have contracted for work he couldn't do. Seth also did such a bad job of what should have been a 30-45 minute task of installing corner bead and drywall mud that I had to spend 5 hours ripping it out and redoing it. He acted surly and resentful when another very minor obstacle was encountered - the toe kicks of the cabinets were cut back further than the tile on the floor extended, so they needed to be shimmed out - even though I offered right away to pay hourly for any extra work it might cost. He expressed that he felt he had completed as much work as he had contracted for and deserved to be paid in full at a time when that was clearly not the case. I paid Seth in full even though he had not completed any of the contracted light installations nor installed the stone wall cap on top of a half wall per our contract. I offered to pay him in full partly because he had done a little extra work shimming the toe kicks of the vanities and doing drywall mudding on the wall for the wall cap (which I didn't realize yet had been done so poorly), and mostly because the vanity installs at least were done and he was not being friendly or helpful and I preferred not to continue working with him.

We interviewed many contractors and quickly new that Seth was the one we would choose. He was very helpful in guiding our decisions during the design phase. He has both excellent aesthetic sense and technical know-how to judge what is feasible. His crew, including electricians, plumbers, carpenters, drywallers, flooring installers, tile-setters, and painters, all do extremely fine work. Seth was easily available, on site whenever needed, and very responsive. Seth and his crew were courteous, conscientious, honest and reliable. Our kitchen and bathroom are absolutely wonderful. I highly recommend Seth and hope to have the chance to work with him again.

Seth Zinder was on time. He was there every day. He was courteous, hard working and the work was done appropriately and in a timely manner. His work was done several years ago. My bathroom and kitchen continue to look wonderful.