COHEN ASSOC JOHN COHEN AIA

Altho the new room and bath ultimately came out well, this was more in spite of the contractor John Cohen than because of him. He turned out to be a nasty man who does shoddy work. For instance, altho all of the other radiators in my house are recessed and covered w/ grates, he initially put an ugly radiator in the new room standing out from the wall w/ no cover at all (also without telling me what he was planning to do). I made him change it. Also, after the radiator was recessed, it was still not installed properly. The pipe that carries the water was pitched toward the radiator rather than away from it, which means that there was a lot of banging. Two friends who are interested in HVAC came in and just started looking at it and told me that it was installed wrong. Ultimately, many months after the job was supposedly complete, I was able to get the plumbing inspector in to look at it and to call John Cohen and ask him and his plumber to reinstall the radiator properly, which they did. Another subcontractor besides the plumber who did shoddy work was the electrician. My regular electrician came in to do some other work and declared the electrical work to be "amateurish" and showed me some examples. the most outrageous is that Mr. Cohen's electrician did not measure properly (or at all) how far from the door jamb to screw in a switch plate. There was not enuf space for the plate and so he had to saw off the end of it! Worst of all, and totally unscrupulous on Mr. Cohen's part is that he did not take out a permit for the AC conversion as he should have. the result of this is that he left me w/ work that was below code and was never inspected. I just happened by good luck to discover what he had done, and so got the township to make him go back many months after the job was supposedly complete and take out a permit, bring the AC up to code, and get it inspected. The conversion project began in July and was supposed to be finished in about 4 months. It was not completed till the following February, and as mentioned above, corrections for shoddy and unscrupulous work had to be made after that.