Timothy J. Bliss

I found Tim on Angie's List and contacted with him via phone and email to re-build our deck in April 2012. Tim re-built our very large deck and did an excellent job. His quote was $11,454. We accepted this quote verbally; unfortunately, we did not have a written contract, which turned out to be a mistake.

Tim, with the help of one man who carried the old and new wood back and forth, completed the job in three days. That man came to us later that summer and said that Tim never paid him for the work and asked to take photos of the completed deck because he planned to sue him in small claims court.

During the course of the deck re-building, Tim cut some electrical wires that were underneath the deck. We, not Tim, paid an electrician $132.72 for the repair. We paid because we felt the electrician should be paid for the work - both the electrician and we agreed that Tim should have paid the bill since he cut the wires.

Tim eventually sent us his first written invoice for another job (described below) that stated that his hourly charge is $60. We learned from Curtis Lumber that the materials for the deck cost approximately $1,840. If he worked three 10-hour days @ $60 per hour ($1,800), the most the deck should have cost is $3,640 plus whatever he did or did not pay his helper. We may be mistaken about some of these details, but Tim refuses to give us receipts for the materials and a breakdown of his time/labor charges.(He told me on 8/26/13 that he worked 5 days on the deck - yet I have email from him stating when he started on 4/18/12 and the cancelled check for the finished work on 4/20/12. Yet another misrepresentation . . . )

In June 2013, Tim returned to stain the deck for which he charged us $3,175.  Again, we agreed to the charge verbally - a big mistake. That job took about two days (16 hours * $60  + 16 hours * ? - his girl friend was his helper (not sure that she is a skilled carpenter ) - equals $960 + the girl friend's time. Again, we may be mistaken about some of these details, but Tim refuses to give us receipts for the materials and a breakdown of his time/labor charges.

At the end of June, we discovered that numerous boards on the deck were leeching sap, which made the deck unusable. We are not sure why that happened--Curtis Lumber says it happens in "one of 100 boards." We suspect it may have been caused by the stain that Tim selected, but we are certainly not sure of that. Tim replaced about 1/3 of the boards but never returned to complete the job. He refuses to repair and re-stain the unusable deck. So not only did he over-charge us by his own accounting, but also we have an unusable deck, and we will need to pay someone to repair it.

We also asked him to repair some of the siding on our house that had rotted. He sent via text message a bid of $5,700 ($2,700 for materials and $3,000 for labor.) I texted him that I accepted his bid of $5,700. Again, a big mistake - not having a written contract. We also offered to pay him a bonus of $1,000 if he would complete the work within two weeks time since his timeliness and communication had been a serious issue over the last two years. When he claimed to have "completed" the job (it was not complete since it suffered from a number of problems), he said we owed him $8,400. (We have since discovered that the cost of the siding materials was about $1,780.) He added charges for staining the siding, which we had assumed was included in his bid since we said, "we accept, your bid for $5,700" and he said nothing to the contrary, plus tradesmen usually bid a job for a whole price.

We withheld $3,000  from our payment in an effort to get him to repair our unusable deck. The end result is that he is taking us to small claims court and threatening us with a "mechanic's lien," to collect the full  $8,400 for which he has arbitrarily billed us. Again, we may be mistaken about some of these details, but Tim refuses to give us receipts for the materials and a breakdown of his time/labor charges. There appears to be no recourse against a mechanic's lien - it seems that contractors can simply charge whatever they want without prior approval.

He also has no intention of repairing our deck.

We have now paid him $18,487, and we have an unusable deck, siding with problems (the stain doesn't match, pieces are falling off) and a potential mechanic's lien, which apparently in NYS cannot be defended against. So we will probably pay him. (We did pay him on 8/26/13 minus the "bonus" - for obvious reasons.

We warn you to not use him. Or if you do, to get everything in writing, including specific charges, timelines, receipts.

Tim did an excellent job, even though the house fought him every step of the way.  When he ran into issues such as interference from both the original and newer vinyl siding, he very professionally corrected them so the door would fit properly.  He had to do some custom carpentry to get the storm door to fit properly, which he did at no extra charge beyond the original estimate.  Because of the nature of the work (having to remove the front door in winter) he had to work around the weather, but we weren't on a schedule.  All the work was completed in a very professional manner, and at the agreed upon price.

I am very happy with them. They did a good job. The price was good too.

HE WAS EXCELLENT. THE PRICE WAS GOOD. HIS WORK WAS EXCELLENT. HE DID AN EXCELLENT JOB. WE HAVE GOTTEN LOTS OF COMMENTS ABOUT IT. OUR HOUSE IS REALLY OLD, AND HE HAD TO MATCH THE LOOK OF OUR HOUSE, AND HE DID THAT VERY WELL.