Castlerock Builders & Remodelers Inc

unknown

Working with Liam was a horrible experience.  It took Liam 6 months to build my deck.  I had to call him every week to plead with
him to come out and work on it.  I ended up doing a lot of the work myself.  The work he did was very sloppy.  He couldn?t care less how it looked.  Part of the deck was crooked and when I pointed it out to him he told me to plant a tree in front of it.  I really regret hiring Liam.

I wouldn't have this builder build me a dog house.  Promised to have work done but no one showed up.  Nothing but broken promises. The work done was good but everything that was torn out is still not cleaned up.  Yard is a mess!

The work took much longer than expected from beginning to end, because on many days the tradesmen did not show up or only worked for an hour or two. It was never clear when they would appear, or when the contractor would come to inspect the work. Sometimes, the inspections would occur after dinner. Because of the intermittent work hours, the project took 3 1/2 months to complete. During the work, contractor continuously promised completion dates that were subsequently pushed forward.
The tradesmen kept garbage in the back yard during the entire project length, although it was put there in the first weeks and should have been removed immediately. When cutting tile, a saw was used indoors instead of scoring and cracking them, which caused a considerable mess in the house. The tile-layer clogged the basement drain while cleaning up his tools and pails, and left the drain for us to unclog. The plumber only worked on Sundays, which is a code violation in the city of Park Ridge for renovation projects. He switched the cold and warm water lines going to the washer. What is worse, when he installed the toilet, he did not see that a plumbing joint was spraying water and left the job that way. It sprayed for over a half-hour until the problem was discovered by chance, and he had to be called back to fix the problem. He had to be coaxed to fix it correctly; during his second atttempt he was ready to leave while it was still dripping. The plumber had two things working against him: his english ability was almost non-existant, and he did not bring enough light to illuminate the work area. He also was not interested in offers to bring him a lamp.
Construction details were occasionally forgotten or not passed on to the tradesmen. This caused delays, because several things had to be redone by the tile-layer, and several tradesmen had to break off their work because details had not been passed on to them. It seemed that language contributed to this problem: the contractor speaks english with a heavy irish accent, and most of the spoke spanish and did not have a good command of english.

We've been pleasantly surprised at how well it's been going. We've completed all the rough carpentry, plumbing, hvac and electrical without any major snags. Liam and his crew have been tremendous. They work everyday and are very professional (i.e. clean up after themselves, show up on time, always available for questions). They also been great with fixing little things along the way and not charging us for every little thing that comes up.