SHAWN PATRICK INC

Shawn Parrick’s work is shoddy and dealing with the owner Roy is like dealing with a child. I hired him to fix water damage on 2 floors and 2 new bathrooms of my mother's house. His workers broke two ceiling fans and when asked why they didn't save them I was told the wings were rotten. When I looked at the wings the screws were still in, they didn't even try to remove them. The house is almost 100 years old and originally had gas for lights. They replaced the ceiling in the kitchen and left a gas pipe exposed. When I asked Roy about this, he said it was always showing and I was wrong. The finishing touches are horrible. The bathroom has an old piece of wood for a door jam. When they removed the light switch, they didn’t fix the woodwork. Electric plug crookedly installed over a sink faucet. Pipes not properly installed that they leaked withing the wall. It cost me $600 to clean the 2nd floor. The dust from the sanding was all over and they didn’t take any care in keeping the place clean. Furniture had plaster all over it. If the plastic wall ripped they did not replace it. The ceiling in the dining room has 3 different shades of white. When emailed the Punch List he ignored what needed to addressed and I have not heard from him since in 6 months. Dealing with Roy is a masterclass in dealing with a child. If he doesn’t like what you say he is not your friend anymore. He won’t talk to you or respond to your texts or emails. He forgets you hired him to work for you and constantly tells you that “I thought that you were my friend.” I can go on with the stories… do yourself a favor and fins a good contractor not Shawn Patrick!

The work is completely sub-standard. The shower tile has flaked off and I had to have someone completely redo it. Now the shower is leaking through to the floor below for the second time. It has been one problem after another for almost 10 years.

I want to make an update to this, and change my rating correspondingly. The bathroom which was fully ripped by this contractor developed water damage due partly to a stack vent leak and partly to an unavoidable drip from the side of the bath (neither of these conditions was the fault of the contractor). Additionally, last year my son developed what his pediatrician called an "allergic wheeze". We had been getting recurring black stains on grout and caulk around the tub and feared the worst (mold), so decided to rip and redo this room again. When the walls were opened we found that a good 20%, perhaps more, of the exterior wall space completely lacked any insulation, including the space behind the tiled shower surround through which the pipes feeding the shower ran - these pipes had no insulation except a foam pipe cover, R value maybe 1 or 2. This lack of insulation or any type of vapor barrier or waterproofing resulted in a condition where, when the shower or bath was run and this area warmed up during cold months, condensation would form on the cement board behind the tile. We found this cement board to be moldy, and when we ripped it, it literally crumbled apart. Other spots in the bathroom were insulated haphazardly at best, with R13 kraft faced batt torn and shoved in by hand, leaving quite a few gaps. In addition to the exterior wall of the shower surround, there was no insulation at all in the wall above the window, and one space around an electrical box had only crumpled kraft paper between interior and exterior wall. We abated with heavy bleach solution anywhere we saw water marks and had the walls redone by another contractor. Our son reports that he has not had to use his inhaler since we did the rip last month. Although some of his difficulty might be seasonal, we're glad we decided to take the plunge. Based on what we found inside the walls when we opened them, I have no choice but to downgrade this provider's overall rating - lowering "quality" and "professionalism" to D. Although I can still vouch for this provider's work in terms of what's visible - finish carpentry, tiling, and drywall - the "guts" behind this work shocked me; there's no other way to put it. I will provide pictures of what we found when we ripped the drywall so you can see what I mean. ***** This work was done about eight or nine years ago, and may not be representative of the company's work at the present time. Note the dates listed above are very approximate - I may be as much as a year off. I purchased a home from my grandmother's estate which had not been updated or otherwise renovated since 1964 and required extensive work, particularly in the kitchen and single bath, to render it habitable, never mind modernize. Roy sat with me and my brother-in-law, a contractor but not licensed for my city, to work out an estimate. The start date was set about two months back; the company was then extraordinarily busy, and had as I recall something like four to six jobs running concurrently with mine, some of which were in another borough. The full job as described above took approximately six months; this extensive length of time was partly due to the fact that, as work was done on one job, say, the kitchen, Roy and I would begin discussing additional work, like the back porch, or as he'd do the roof, I might mention insulating the attic. Additional issues arose continually; modern cabinet depths, for instance, meant that the rear kitchen door needed reframing, while the rip of the old shingles uncovered water damage to the roof decking. So the job kept getting longer as they were there. Roy and Shawn Patrick bill themselves as a soup-to-nuts contractor, and while on the job at my location they used no subcontractors except the stone company which provided and installed the granite countertops. This has good and bad points. The good: finish carpentry, structural work, tiling, and wiring was done expertly and I have had no problems with anything along those lines in these years since they finished. Further, there was never any issue with scheduling - work never had to stop while the crew waited on a trade, since all the trades were represented. The bad: plumbing work was iffy, and while this may have been due partly to constraints given an old house built with studs, lath, scratch coat and plaster, I have had difficulty ever since with noisy pipes and slow drainage. Additionally, the company removed large cast aluminium radiators from the kitchen and bath, and replaced these with baseboard which turned out to be entirely inadequate to the needs of the space, and in both rooms additional retrofit work to the heating units by a regular plumber, such as replacement of the baseboard with a small radiator in the bathroom and changes to the baseboard feed pipes in the kitchen, was necessary in later years to make the rooms comfortable. This has proven to be a long-term issue. Lastly, the basic laborers on the crew are not always knowledgeable about installation of the supplies - I ascribe this to how terribly busy the company was; I assume they were hiring new laborers who weren't entirely familiar with the work. For example, when a kitchen cabinet literally pulled itself apart, with the box falling off and leaving the backing attached to the wall, the cabinet company representative originally told me that he could refuse replacement because improper installation had voided the warranty (he did end up honoring warranty, I think in large part due to Roy's very vocal advocacy). Similarly, a roofing specialty company who much later retrofitted snow guards under the extremely expensive high-end vinyl slate-look shingles mentioned to me that the shingles had been installed touching each other, as you would install asphalt, but that installation instructions embossed on the underside of the shingles themselves specified 1/4 inch space between each. Should the shingles now fail, I am sure this too would void warranty. (However it's important to note that Roy did tell me this was the first of this type roof he'd installed.) All this being said, my job was extremely extensive - practically rebuilding the house - and I think would have strained the abilities of any contractor. Most of the regular work done was done quickly, professionally and well. His finish carpentry and tiling has stood the test of time; the bath still looks great, as does the kitchen. When I requested a kitchen island he built one of two cabinet boxes attached back-to-back, with a granite top that matched my counters, and added casters - a very creative innovation. Given some creative room to run, he has an excellent design sense - I gave almost no specifications with regard to how the basement should be finished, and this may have been the most trouble-free installation of all. Moreover, any structural work - perhaps the most important of everything done - was solid and well made and has definitely stood up just fine. Issues with the plumbing, including that which supplies heat to the two rooms which constituted the bulk of the renovation, do abound. If I'd known then what I know now, I might have insisted that he use my own plumber. Nor would I have let him try his skills on a new product (like my roof) but I suppose that's my fault, for simply having him do it all, rather than spend the time doing my own homework. And one final small complaint - due to the fact that he was so busy, it was terribly difficult to get one or two workmen here, as opposed to a big crew, to finish up the "punch list" - the little details that every contractor must tidy up at the end of a big job. Likewise when one of the shingles later blew off in a very bad storm, it took months to get him to send a man by with a replacement. You get the whole crew, or a long wait. Overall result: his top men in any given specialty are indeed top men, with plenty of experience under their belts. I can't stress enough that the work looks great; tiling, finish work, installation and room design are all absolutely terrific. Additionally, as I mentioned, structural work, so hugely important, was done exceptionally well. However, the general laborers in the crew are often sloppy (one used my dryer as a sawhorse, scratching the enamel) or insufficiently knowledgeable about the products they're working with, which can lead to future problems in the event of product failure. And I really wish I'd had a professional plumber. Would I use him again? Well ... yes. Given my knowledge of his crew's limitations, and my own understanding, gained over those six months, of how much supervision a homeowner needs to provide (you really can't ever just "set it and forget it" when it comes to your house, I'm afraid), I would indeed hire him for new work, within those limits. For some things I might perhaps insist on a sub. But overall the company's done a good job given the scope of the work.