THREE STRANDS INC
About us
Three Strands is a full service design build remodeling company that was started and still run by its founder Jim Tevlin in 1979. We have 4 employees with a strong skill set of not only doing our trade well, but listening & communicating well with our clients. We emphasize designing within a budget and building within a schedule.
Business highlights
Services we offer
We provide design & building services for residential & light commercial remodeling. We offer our Design-Build process for many of the jobs we do which starts with our initial appt. and moves to our Preliminary Design & Budget Agreement. We work with a collection of very qualified subcontractors that we feel are part of our team.
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Strands because he communicated well during the bidding process.
Sadly, that skill did not carry through the project. All went
well during the siding replacement, until the deck needed to be removed.
I thought it was their choice, and they would be responsible to
replace it the way it was. They seemed kind of sneaky in trying to
get my permission to rebuild it without giving me complete info, like the
price. (They sneaked in other price increases too.) I was shocked
to finally get the estimate at approximately $3,400. Jim was unable
to explain this to me to straighten it out. The weeks turned into
months without reconciliation.
The window replacement went fine, as far as I know, but they were not
caulked correctly. We re-caulked ourselves. They also did not
haul away the shutters.
But those weren't the main thing that went wrong. It was the plaster
nightmare. The plasterer refused to transition the entry ceiling to
the living room ceiling with a "feathered in" transition, as
written in the contract, and Jim refused to require him to do so. During
the process both Jim and the plasterer were rude, blaming, disinterested
in my satisfaction, and unprofessional. Jim uses backhanded blame to
excuse this by stating that having work done is always stressful to the
homeowner.
Here are the details: I also had picked Jim because he claimed
that to fix my cracked ceiling, plaster would be more professional-looking
than just patching the cracks. The plasterer started his work,
and I liked the sweeping texture he was doing. I had to be gone part of
the first day (my adult son was home), and when I got home the plasterer
was gone already. I found a ?curb? transitioning his new
entry texture to the old living room texture, instead of the seamless,
smooth, ?feathered in? transition I had asked for.
(Re-plastering the ceiling consists of adding two layers of plaster, one
the base, and the other the "topping" for the finish texture.
These layers add about 3/8 inch to the existing ceiling. This
plasterer rounded off the 3/8 inch edge and it looked like a curb, like
the curb from the sidewalk to the street, only upside down on the ceiling.
He calls this a "line," which is poor communication
because it is misleading. I describe it as a "curb."
The curb was about 4 feet long. To me, ?line? means the place where
the new texture A meets the old texture B.) I discovered that
the plasterer?s vocabulary is ?line,? meaning both ?curb? and ?the place where
the new texture A meets the old texture B.? For him, it seems you can't
separate the two. I told him I was fine
with the two textures coming together there (the two textures aren?t noticeably
different to me), but he argued with me and said I wouldn?t like it.
When I saw the curb, I tried to see if I could live with it. By the
next day I had determined I couldn't. I told the plasterer that
it wasn't what I had wanted, and asked what he could do to finish it off
smooth. He got mad. He talked a lot and didn't listen.
He had a lot of excuses like "all plasterers do it this
way." He said my way would be "uglier." (!)
I was pretty upset that he wouldn't make an effort to finish it the
way I wanted. At that point I didn't remember what the contract said, I
only remembered that I had never even considered anything but a smooth
transition, and I was willing to pay extra for a change order if it came
to that. It was such a simple thing to fix. I called Jim about it,
who was equally disinterested in my wishes, insisting I had verbally
agreed to that transition. I went downstairs (daylight basement) for the
rest of the day to get away from the plasterer and let him cool down.
After he had left for the day, I came back up and noticed he had
scraped the curb down a little, but there was still a lump across where the
curb had been. It looked like a bad patch job. Later Jim
called to blame me because "[the plasterer] was really p*****
off." It sounded like Jim was really p***** off too. He
just ranted and made no attempt to reconcile or resolve the situation,
other than ignoring my request. Later, I suggested to Jim that the
plasterer come back and chisel the rest of the curb out and re-finish it
smooth. Jim called me back and said that the plasterer would come
over early the next Saturday. (He didn't try to find a time that
would be okay for me too.) When the plasterer showed up for that,
he was still angry and blaming me for agreeing to the "line."
He scraped a little but refused to chisel it out. He said that if I
insisted on having him chisel it out, he would, but he would
"guarantee" I wouldn't like it and he would not come back to fix
it. I took that to mean he would deliberately do a bad job, and
I sent him home. Jim never asked if I was satisfied. Later
when I looked at the contract, I found it said "feathered in" in
Jim's handwriting. Jim and the plasterer claim I made an oral
agreement when Jim and the plasterer came to look at the job, before Jim
wrote and submitted the bid. I do forget things sometimes, but not
when a seamless transition was so important to me from the beginning.
I certainly didn't agree to a ?curb? transition, since I have never
heard of that before this, and the plasterer only used the word ?line?
which doesn't really convey ?curb.? I have seen transitions where
one texture meets another, but it is still smooth. I was a Realtor
for a while, and I have never seen a ?curb.? I kept waiting,
ultimately 3 months, for Jim to cool down or try to reconcile. It was
such a simple matter. I'm not sure if he ever did.
The resolution: I had to call another plasterer (found on Angie?s
List) to chisel out the remainder of the curb and finish it smooth. Now
it is completely seamless, and I am very happy with it. I paid
the new guy about $200 for the job, including mileage from Salem, and
docked Jim's final payment by the same amount.
It boggles my mind that any contractor can stay in business if he acts this
way. Jim didn't care about my satisfaction, didn't honor the
contract, or require the plasterer to comply. It is weird that Jim
never corrected himself about the contract?or maybe he still hasn't looked at
it. Look up the Ecclesiastes verse about three strands that Jim has
on his website. I wonder if he thinks it entitles him and his buddies to
gang up on a customer. He knew I am disabled and low income.
I found out from a lawyer that it is a lot of work to complain to the
Construction Contractor?s Board
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