Avenue B Development LLC

At first Jeff was hiring subcontractors, but by the end, he was doing most of the work himself. He either couldn't see when things looked bad, or was hoping we wouldn't notice. The quality of the work was noticeably poor and it was frustrating to have to point things out to him over and over. Eventually, we concluded that he just was not able to fix things the right way. After three months, we decided to give up and call it done even though there were many problems remaining. Since the floor tile was installed with a 1 inch gap next to a door threshold, we had to hire someone to either replace this threshold, which was original to the house, or rip out and reinstall the tile. The wall tile was installed with too much grout overlapping the tile, and there were tiles cut unevenly and cut edges that were ragged. We had to rebuild a cabinet door that Jeff built, which looked bad and didn't function as we had hoped. We had to reinstall trim that was not level (after we tried many times to get him to fix this properly). We had to move some electrical boxes that he'd put in too close together. And, we had to do extensive cleaning since the crew left things in such a mess. (After the foundation repair, we had two doors that wouldn't shut and asked him to please prioritize getting the doors shut. Instead, they sat open for two months, filling the back of the house with dirt and mosquitoes.) Worst of all, we had to rebuild a wall and door jamb that were slightly out of kilter to begin with, but which were worsened badly after the foundation work was done. Unfortunately, Jeff's crew just went ahead and tiled this wall instead of fixing it right in the first place. This situation typifies the problem with Jeff's work as a GC -- instead of alerting us to the problem and proposing a solution to fix this wall properly while we had the chance, he just tiled it, painted it, and presented it to us as complete without even mentioning the obvious problems. Now we're left having to rebuild a wall that is 2 full inches out of plumb -- undoing and redoing work that was badly done, instead of fixing it right the first time. In the end, we will probably end up spending around $5000 to redo work that we hired Avenue B to do. We have had other tradesman comment on the poor quality of the work. It's all very frustrating since we feel we paid for work that didn't meet our expectations. We knew there was a limit to the scope of this project since it was on a fixed bid, but we wish Jeff had drawn the lines more clearly instead of cutting corners. If it had taken 3 times longer than it was supposed to -- or if it had exceeded the budget -- but everything was done right and looked great, we wouldn't be so upset. In the end, we are glad it's over. And we have certainly learned some valuable lessons about doing due diligence on contractors in the future.