All Purpose Improvements

Jerry Davis and All Purpose Improvements came in as one of the lowest bids for the project, but buyer beware as our experience with Jerry Davis was a nightmare and the costs continue to mount to this day. He began the project in early winter. I paid the first installment and a week or so later, a bunch of lumber and materials were delivered, including the trusses, into my old driveway and sat there, literally rotting for a month or longer. When they finally got around to beginning the project, the owner, Jerry Davis, asked me to contact the utility location service, which I did, but the service does not locate the water lines for geothermal heating systems. I showed Jerry Davis where the lines exited our home and I talked to him about it on more than one occasion on the phone including the night before his crew came out to dig the footers. I even spray painted the area where the lines exit the house. Still, they dug the geothermal lines up almost immediately. It was the middle of winter and the crew did not inform us that they had done so and we only discovered the issue when our furnace lights indicated an error in the system. At first his crew lied about doing any damage but eventually admitted to seeing "water shoot out of the house" but said that they "thought it was nothing.? We were fortunate that this did not destroy the Geothermal Unit as running it without any fluids in the system can cause the system to malfunction. Needless to say, this stalled the job for several weeks while the repair was made by another contractor. I should have fired Jerry Davis and All Purpose Improvements immediately, but I was na?ve. The project moved forward, and it wasn?t long before new problems became apparent including: A crew member who refused to stop smoking marijuana on the job Poorly installed and buckling siding Missing items such as the GARAGE DOOR OPENER which he claimed he forgot was part of the job and they neglected to re-install the drain tile around the garage and did not grade the land around the garage leaving a slope aimed directly at the side and front of the garage. He continually promised to complete the work, but the job eventually ended before the work was finished. While one of his crew members was using a front loader to grade the driveway (and was only about 1/2 way through with the job) Jerry drove up with a trailer and ordered him to drive it onto the trailer because he needed to take it back to the rental outfit before he was charged an additional day's rent. As a result, my wife and I were forced to park our vehicles in our old driveway and were not able to use our new garage when it rained because the driveway was too steep, wasn?t draining correctly, lacked enough gravel, a good portion of which was being washed into the street with every rain. Jerry promised to complete the job but never returned. But it didn?t end there. About a month later, we received a summons to court. Jerry Davis had not paid the subcontractor who repaired our geothermal line. This was the beginning of 6 long, expensive months spent in court, with dates continually being reset because Jerry never showed up in court. I did have one final phone conversation with Jerry during our court case and he told me that he wasn't worried because he would just file bankruptcy and that he has his business set up in such a way that he can ?file bankruptcy anytime? he wants to, which he soon did and we didn't see a dime of the money we paid in court fees, repairs and costs to complete the job he had agreed to do. To this day, we are still finding problems and the garage continues to cost us money. We have had to pay to have the driveway completed, which cost us nearly $3,000. A few months ago we found a leak in our attic caused by the improperly installed shingles in one of the valleys where the garage roof meets our home. It had aparantely been leaking for a little while and we had mold in our attic. We paid over $1000 to have the roof repaired, have sprayed the mold and are hoping this does not lead to more serious problems, but now the other valley has begun to leak. The garage floor is filled with cracks and we have been told it is possible that Jerry Davis did not install the concrete slab correctly and that we'll soon have to replace that. Today, I was doing some work in the garage in preparation of installing drywall and finishing the space and found a 10/3 (meant to carry 30 amps of service) spliced to a length of extension cord. They spliced it in two places and did not use a junction box and did not reconnect the wires completely and they left two of the hot wires loose in the wall. We are lucky this didn?t cause a fire. They used the extension cord to splice the wire in the place where they installed a door leading from our home into the garage. The total length of the splice was about 15 feet or less and the cost of the right electrical wire would have been about $20. Their laziness could have cost us our home. We did what we thought was the right amount of research before Hiring Jerry Davis to build our garage. We checked references, checked with the better business bureau and looked at some of his completed work. These things simply don't stop a bad contractor from being hired. The lesson I learned from this experience is to be highly critical at the beginning of the job and to never hesitate to stop the work and/or fire a contractor at the first sign of trouble.

I wish that Angie's list had been around at the time and that I had not been so naive about the process. They did the work, but there were some problems (electric conduit was sticking out at the top corner of the wall and nail holes were filled with the wrong material). Over the next year, I called API once a month to come back and fix these things. They kept saying they had lost my number or other such excuses. At one point, they hired someone else to fix these things, but this person didn't show up either. When I called back, the owner swore at me for calling him so often. By the time that I finally went to a lawyer, he had already filed bankruptcy. The bigger problems were realized in late 2007/early 2008. After taking a shower one day, I came out to a puddle of water. The shower is on a raised part of the floor, and the water was coming from below the raised part. I hired a plumber to come fix it. When the plumber opened up the floor, he found that API had incorrectly assembled the plumbing. They had laid the pipes on a floor drain and used spray foam to hold them there! It is now properly fixed.