Hale Construction - Austin Kenney

Austin Kenney - Hale Construction is a total hack. He butchered 2 ceramic tile floor jobs of mine (long story but I didn't adequately check the first job until I hired him for the second). On one job I'll need to pay someone approximately 6 or more hours to clean up grout that he got all over the floor and to re-do grout lines (HE CAN NOT GROUT). He stiffed me by refusing to return phone calls to correct that problem, hence these complaints being made public. He also cut through a cable wire and broke the tenant's coffee pot at that job. On the 2nd job, he again butchered the grout job. In addition, he abandoned the job in the middle of it for weeks claiming he wanted to have our cabinets installed first (counter to what he said at the beginning of the job). A piece of baseboard was lost during this mess. At the job's conclusion, he put my threshold in backwards creating a trip hazard, and then when he turned it around the tile didn't meet up with the threshold properly so there was a large gap that had to be grouted and looked terrible. He also was about to lay the tile in the wrong direction than what we decided (there seems to be MANY communication problems with this guy) but he convinced us this that was the right way. He made a bad situation worse in a spot on the floor that had a leveling challenge. The tiles are so badly leveled from tile to tile that my girlfriend who tends to shuffle her feet can no longer walk on the floor in socks. He tried to get out of tiling under the dishwasher which he at first had agreed to do. He probably spent 7 full days over a many-week period of time on what he said would be a 3 day job. He tried to charge an additional $600+ dollars to the job at the conclusion for what he deemed 'unanticipated expenditures'. I could go on and on but I'm too disgusted just conjuring up memories of this. My advice - Don't hire this guy for anything. He'll butcher your job, try to add charges to it, and won't stand by his work, and will appear to be overwhelmed throughout the job. But he WILL have an answer for everything.