L J HARRIS CUSTOM BUILDERS

It was such a horrible experience, I fired him, and I lost money in the process. I filed a complaint which was substantiated with the office of the consumer affairs, and I saw him on Angie's List, and I tried to write a review, however, he changes his company name periodically. So I couldn't write a review, because I had used him under a different company name. Initially he promised a completion date that was very good, he described his crew coming in, doing the demolition, and getting all this done. As it turned out, there was no real crew, he had one or two guys that he was paying very low wages to, and one of them was on his first contracting job, and the other had some experience. The job dragged on for 10 months, and it was supposed to be done in 3 months. There was extra work that he charged me for, at every step of the way. Several of the projects that were included in this, had to be redone, because they were done incorrectly. I was cursing him this morning, because the front door was falling off, because the hinges were put in correctly. I had paid him upfront for a custom cabinet upfront, unfortunately, I should have never paid him upfront for anything, because the cabinets were never delivered. I had to pursue getting that money back. It was a horrible experience and could go on forever. I thought I would alert people through the experience I've had. He claims that he has been in business for 35 years. I dug deeper and found that he had 2 other businesses before the one that I dealt with, and the reviews from people were similar, no shows, delays, overcharges and things like those. I had hired him because of the reasonable price, and extra charges started coming up within 2 weeks. He had suggested a cathedral ceiling in the kitchen and he first quoted a price of 22,000 Dollars, and came down to 6,000 Dollars for it. There was an ever changing cast of workers here, some would be here for a week and then you would never see them again. He had promised to be here on site everyday, but he was never on site. He was not responsive at all. There were so many time, when he would just cancel or not show up, and he would show up at 10 in the morning and leave early. I think he is a professional conman. I have written reviews about him in the past, and have received threatening phone calls and emails from him.

We should have known from the start when he said work would start in November 2009 and it was delayed until February 2010. The price quoted for the job seemed fair, based on other estimates, however once work started, there were issues, "unexpected and unforseen extra work". At first, I thought, well he should have forseen these issues, but I didn't complain and paid the extra money. This happened with everything he touched. Nothing cost what it was supposed to, and in addition, it was taking forever to get anything done. His helpers showed up at 7:30 am and waited for him. His usual arrival time was 10:30 am, when he came at all. There was one delay after another. In all, he was in my house (a small cottage!) for 10 months and finished nothing completely. When it finally came time to install the kitchen cabinets, he announced tha the walls (which he put up) were way out of plumb and he would have to do an additional $3000 worth of work to install the cabinets. At that point we had had enough and fired him. We demanded delivery of the cabinets, which we had paid for. He refused delivery of the cabinets, counters and a bay window, also all paid for. We're in the process of legal procedings now.