Stoneworks

This contractor cost my next door neighbor $50,000, didn't do the job correctly or finish it, and created issues for three different bordering neighbors (including myself) that my neighbor ended up having to address using another contractor. She lived out of state and her Arlington home (which she was renting) had a large old retaining wall that was failing. She contracted with Doug in July-ish of 2012. He didn't start until September. Most of the time he worked alone. By October, he'd convinced her to pay him all of the money for the project even though it wasn't complete. (I don't think she realized how little he'd gotten done.) By the end of October, he had managed to demolish the old wall, dig a huge deep (15+ foot) pit in her back yard, and get about halfway down with a new wall. He also managed to take down some trees from the other neighbor's adjoining yard and build part of a smaller lower wall on their property. There was a makeshift driveway in a third neighbor's backyard that allowed access to our neighbor's project. It was only supposed to be there for a few weeks until the project was complete, but ended up being there for close to a year until the neighbor paid someone else to do the project. Doug abruptly stopped working around the end of Oct 2012, saying he'd injured his back. He did not return to work on the wall or send anyone else to work on it. In the mean time, Hurricane Sandy and a bunch of winter weather caused our yard to start eroding into the neighbor's pit. Every storm resulted in more erosion, eventually creating a huge safety hazard in our yard for our small children. Once we got through winter and Spring 2013 arrived and we didn't see anyone working on the project, we contacted our neighbor to figure out what was going on. Doug kept giving her excuses why he couldn't get started. He didn't put a temporary hazard fence around the eroded hole in our yard until we complained to the city, and when he finally started coming to work on the project, it was irregular / infrequent. We had a couple of masons come to take a look at the situation and give us recommendations about what we could do to prevent further erosion until the neighbor's project was complete. They both basically said he didn't know what he was doing. One said he was a long way off from finishing and had probably stopped because he didn't know how to continue; the other said the wall would have to be taken down and completely redone. We passed this information on to our neighbor. Once she confirmed this information to her satisfaction, she spent months working with her lawyer to legally remove him from the project, as the city was unable to do anything about it. She was finally able to remove him and had to spend another huge amount of money (I don't remember exact numbers, but it was close to what she paid for the original job) hiring another contractor to take down Doug's shoddy work and redo the whole project, including fixing all the problems that Doug had created with the neighbors. The second contractor (who was fantastic) had a whole crew of workers and completed everything to the engineer's satisfaction in a few weeks time. The project, which was originally only supposed to take a few weeks, was completed by a different contractor over a year after it had originally been contracted at a huge cost to my neighbor and much headache to both she and three of her neighbors.

He was very excellent. I would highly recommend him

The corners and walls began cracking quite quickly. We?ve contacted him numerous times, but he?s clearly quite flaky. He always promises to finish the job, but fails to show or contact me back. Whenever he does come, he just looks at the project but never actually does any work. I'm left with crumbling stairs that would only take 2-3 days to fix. I've already paid him in full, so I feel stuck.