US Contractors

Victor and crew arrived on time and set right to work. Did a beautiful job, had to apply new color coat over a very rough previous stucco. Cleaned up their messes which was important to me as the previous guy left mess when it was done about 15 years ago. Our old home looks almost new again.

When asked to provide a quote, the owner was quite professional, punctual and polite. He and his crew jumped on the work, but the same people almost never showed up twice and judging from their work, they were inexperienced day laborers. After the first couple of days, they would not arrive at the work-site until well after 9 a.m. and sometimes not until after 10 a.m. On at least one Friday, no one showed up at all with no explanation or phone call. Once the scratch coat work began, the work was sloppy. On one occasion, the owner had to leave the work-site and one of his workman continued the job. At quitting time, the remaining worker asked me to take him home because he did not have a ride. I took him home because he was a good guy, but it was almost 50 miles round trip. Additionally his crew dumped slurry from the mixer onto my landscaping. After approximately three weeks, the scratch coat was still not complete and there was no good reason such as inclement weather. After making numerous phone calls, the scratch coat was worked on sporadically and finally completed in approximately 5 weeks. It should have taken less than two. The scratch coat was uneven, too thick in some areas, too thin in others and had been put on too wet or too dry in still other areas. With weather becoming too cold to continue just before Thanksgiving, we insisted that he not install the color coat until spring because if it was too cold, as it would ruin the color coat. He then requested to leave the scaffolding up all winter to which we resoundingly answered "no!". Throughout this ordeal his phone number changed at least twice and he often did not respond to our messages, or if he did respond it would be several days after we had left a message. Throughout the winter, my wife and I picked up over 3/4 of a cubic yard of scratch coat that had been slopped all around our house. In many areas we had to use a pick-axe and a sledge hammer to break it up. I also had to remove large globs of scratch coat from lighting junction boxes before reinstalling the lighting. They even had buried my TV cable in the scratch coat and that was after cutting it three times. The best thing the contractor did was to agree to end the deal when spring came. After it was over with, we found out that he was no longer registered with the BBB as he had claimed. I probably got less work done than what I paid for, but it was worth it just to be able to extricate myself from this deal. US Contractors was long on promises but short on actual delivery.