Dream Catcher Renovations

Brian provided us with an itemized list of materials some of them noted in green. My wife took it to mean that these were items that needed to be picked which toilet, which vanity, which shower, she communicated this to Brian. To get the project started and on the calendar Brian collected a check from my wife for 3600 dollars. approximately 25% of the quoted price of the job. Work was supposed to commence on Monday 5-14-18. We asked if they would need keys or what the plan was to get in the house we have an alarm system and both I and my wife work. The answer was no they would just need to do inventory that day and would not need to get inn the house. Come the morning of the 14th My wife gets a phone call asking how they were to get into the house to commence work... My wife talks to Brian and he agrees to meet with her later in the day. Later in the day Brian explains to my wife that the items listed in green on his estimate were our responsibility to purchase. this is not noted on the estimate and is not spoken of in the emails. he has also brought a contract along to sign. Fortunately my wife has enough sense not to sign it. I get home realize that he is a con artist and I call him and tell him we will not be doing work, and tell him that minus the cost of time it took him to come and estimate work we would like our deposit of 3600 dollars returned. A long pause on the phone... Then he says I can't do that. I am now pursuing action with the state attorney generals office. This man is a con artist and we may have been taken for 3600 dollars. I hope not but until that money is back in my hand I am going to consider it lost.

An absolute horror story. Brian came recommended to us from a friend and seemed very honest and knowledgable from our initial meeting. My wife and I were looking for to have some minor renovation work, cabinet install done and when asked our budget we told him 6k. This was our first mistake...little did we know the job we were asking was never close to 6k worth of work. We were happy when Brian provided a quote for just over 5k and didn't look too closely at it since we trusted his expertise. Brian came by and collected a check for about 50% which was $2500. Brian ordered cabinets from home depot and told us he didn't realize he had to assemble them, it would be an extra $250. Sounds fine, honest mistake we thought. The first day he told us there was an outlet that needed to be moved higher, it would be an extra $350...ok again, things come up. He also removed a cabinet to make room for a dishwasher. The next day I came home after work and found the three cabinets along the wall had been installed...oddly enough though they were installed so high up that we couldn't reach into the base of the tallest one without a step stool. The adjacent cabinet which the microwave was supposed to hang from was so high that nearly the entire microwave would be above the fridge. The sideboard beside the dishwasher that was installed had holes filled with spackle. I called Brian the next day and his offer was to install new cabinets that we could reach for around $1700. I told him to put the project on pause while I thought things over. It was at that moment that I took a closer look at our invoice and noticed $1200 in material for cabinets...that had to be too high. I found the cabinets on Home Depot and added them in a cart which came to $400. Then I looked at the boxes of tile that were on the counter set to be installed...the box of 100 tiles was $16 and the box of trim had 36 pieces that according to the SKU number were 79 cents each. The material charge for those two boxes of tiles according to Brian...$250! There was a line item for custom tile I had found to match our other cabinet for $480 and that was the only price Brian didn't try to scam us on, but he did have the tile sent to his house and never gave it to us. In the meantime Brian sent an email threatening mediation if we didn't pay him an additional $2,000 on top of the $2,500 which included an invoice for work not performed and $1200 for installing the cabinets...which at that point would need to be uninstalled. The next morning I called Brian and said we'd be happy to settle up the cost if we could see the actual homedepot.com charge for our material....a very long pause until Brian said he didn't know if he would be able to find them. This ended up going back and forth through the day with texts...Brian lowering his price several hundred dollars but still wanting over 1k additional dollars when he owed us money the entire time and that it was ridiculous to ask for receipts. He eventually sent a picture of a handwritten itemized receipt. At that point I grabbed the manuals from all of the cabinets, double checked the SKU numbers and came up with an additional $400 over charge. The next day we had a cabinet installer come by and tell us he'd never seen cabinets installed so high and explained that the sideboard was made up of a cut up cabinet with spackle in the bolt holes and that it was just a hack way to put something on there. I also went to move the base cabinet that had been assembled down into the basement to get it out of the way and the whole think literally fell apart. Screws dropped out of it and I was able to just slide the pieces apart....they never even bothered to screw it together. The silver lining in the whole story is that we got out when we did. We lost $2500 plus expenses to uninstall the cabinets and sideboard but it could have been $6k with a disaster of a kitchen. Also with the $3,500 we didn't spend, an honest contractor is installing semi-custom solid wood cabinets with an itemized list...it's too bad we didn't find him first and essentially allowed someone to come into our home to rob us blind.