Quality Masonry

Floyd came out and gave an estimate. He told us it would take a day and a half and could start on Tuesday. On Monday, he dropped off some of the firebrick, which he said he had left over from a previous job and he was going to purchase more. I asked if the brick should be stored in our garage because it was going to rain. He said he put a tarp over it and it would be fine. He showed up around 4:30 Tuesday evening with his son to help. His son, Floyd Jr., laid the base and the bottom part of our walls the first night. Being a school night, I wasn't able to "watch" them as well as I normally like to but by the end of the night, I could tell things were going wrong. Floyd said he had a doctors appointment the next morning but he would come as soon as it was over. He called late that afternoon to say he had to have some emergency testing done and would come to finish the next day. Thursday he came around 10:30 and finished up. I wasn't thrilled with the final results but my plan was to paint the firebrick black and I thought I could camouflage the mistakes. We made him well aware that we were not happy with the aesthetics and he said if we painted it and we still weren't happy he would come and repair it. After some further inspections, we found so many things wrong that we called him to say we weren't going to waste our money to paint it and then have it torn out again we would simply like to have our labor portion of our money back since the entire fireplace would have to be ripped out and replaced. When we started tearing it down we found out how bad his work really was. Because the brick had gotten wet while sitting outside, the grout stuck all over it and even when wire brushed, would not come off. He used concrete board for the top of our firebox which is against all code. The concrete board was also not properly mortared in, which left a gap big enough for me to get my fingers into when it was pushed against. All of the grout lines shifted to the left instead of being in a line. I noticed this from the beginning and when I asked for it to be fixed, his apparent solution was to slap more mortar on and make a wider grout line. When I went to measure for gas logs one side of our fireplace was two inches shallower than the other side. It has been five days and we still haven't heard from Floyd.