cara the carpenter

This contractor does an OK job. She is not someone to hire for a high value professional job. This review is more about her lack of professionalism than her job. The biggest issue we had with her was her attitude. She is very moody and can flip on a dime. We hired her because she had done a small attic remodel for a friend who referred her to us. She had also done a small previous job at one of our rental property several months before. We were not very satisfied with that job but we were in a crunch and decided to hire her again this second time. So we hired her on the rental property in question. She was working alone and that is what we were expecting. The agreement was she will bill us for her time $40 per hour and we had a sense of how much that will be based on the job at hand. On the first day she came alone as expected. Then on the second day she said her nephew who is starting his own contracting job will be coming to help her because "he had nothing to do right now". At first we thought nothing of it as we assumed she will pay for his learning through what we pay her. But we decided to ask her on the second day to make sure we were not paying extra for his learning.To our surprise she was billing us $25 per hour for his presence on top of the $40 we were paying her. This was a bit upsetting considering this nephew was not very good at what he was doing. He was also not safety conscious and thereby accident prone. The first time he almost drilled through his finger and the second time he almost fell through the floors which had open floor boards because we were moving some plumbing in the bathroom. He doesn't wear any safety gear. This all sent alarm bells. Essentially we was paying an additional $25 for an accident prone rookie. After telling her that we could do without the nephew working on our project, it became clear that her attitude changed and she seemed upset by the fact that we asked that she not keep her nephew on the job especially if he was there because he had nothing else to do! A few days later after the job was done, we asked for business cards including from the nephew. This is a courtesy we do for anyone we hire not necessarily meaning we will hire that person again. We own several rental properties, so we have business cards from many contractors and have made it a standard habit to ask for business cards. So we did the same with Cara the Carpenter as well as with her niece even though there was no way we were ever going to have the the niece do a job for us considering he is still a rookie and accident prone. After the job was done, we got a text from Cara saying that we had asked her nephew for his phone number and somehow we wanted to hire him behind her back (we have saved that text for its ridiculousness!). We were a little taken aback by that accusation. We told her that wasn't the case and that we ask everyone for business cards. We later realized that she had been seething all along after we had asked her not to include her nephew on the job. This seemed rather petty. We were willing to pay her but not someone learning on our dime. We had also observed that while he was on the job, she would give him tiny jobs like connecting plumbing pipes or putting up drywall. There was a sense that she didn't really trust him to take on more serious work. Not to mention that some of the work pieces he had done were not well done. She put us in a bit of a tight spot because she was working with a relative whom she seemed emotionally attached to and could not understand our asking her to let him go. It was a financial reason for us as well as the fact that we did not want any liabilities. and we were trying to tiptoe around the issue and asking her to get him off the job because we But she ended up billing us fully for both their times. The final job was ok quality but will certainly not be hiring her again. She is very sensitive, lacks professional judgement especially in bringing in a rookie relative and billing us for his learning.