COLLINS AND DESERANNO CONSTRUCTION

From the beginning I thought the price was high, but I knew the contractors from a prior profession (not construction) and wanted to give them the business. The two owners and one employee arrived at about 8 AM and sat in their truck in my driveway for an hour smoking and leaving cig butts in the driveway. They also sat in my driveway for an hour at the end of each day they worked. They finally came in and began working to take out the kitchen island. It took all three of them to figure out how to do it after much consultation. Then we had to wait while a licensed plumber capped the water pipe. In moving the electrical plug, they cut a jagged hole in the side of my island cabinet and ran the casing for the wire right through an area I use for storage of pots and pans. They also installed the pantry door. I asked them to move the hinges to the other side for ease of entry, which they did, leaving a hold in my vinyl flooring. In negotiating the contract, I had agreed that I would paint the wood door. The second day they tackled the molding and base. It took them 8 hours to do the one room and it was like watching the three stooges. This is a very new company and if I had to guess, I would say it was the first time they had done crown molding. The contractors left all the nail holes unfilled and large cracks between runs of the baseboard and crown molding.They sawed the molding on our deck with the door open and blew sawdust all over our dining room and didn't clean it up. This after telling us they were "white glove" careful. My main complaint is this: I took the pantry door from the hinges to my shop to paint it and while putting the primer on, a layer of the door started peeling like veneer. When I called the contractor to get a new door, he made me feel like he was doing me a huge favor by getting me a new door and that somehow it was my fault. After a few weeks the new door appeared leaning on our porch with no offer to install it. My husband tried to install it, but found that the contractor must have shaved wood off the original door to make it fit. We called him and asked him to pick up the door and make it fit, but he asked that we deliver it, so we did. He went on and on about how this was eating into his other work on a large barn he was building and that he would be off schedule on that. We later found that the barn was his OWN. The contractor altered the door to fit within a couple of days and delivered it by again leaning it near our front door. He never once offered to install it. When my husband installed the second door, we found that you could see the jagged saw marks where material had been removed to narrow the door. Also the door was cut off the plumb at the bottom where the contractor had sawn to shorten it. We went to a professional woodworkers place and had a door made for another $500. We think the original price was enough to have covered installing a quality door.