Barton Builders

My home is an almost 100 year old craftsman aircraft bungalow style home with clapboard exterior. It is two story and needed repair to some damaged wood, scraped, painted, and some additional exterior work like repairing a beam under my dining room. Max game me an estimate for the work and I asked lots of questions regarding who would be supervising the type of lumber, the experience they had with this type of home etc. and although the estimate was a little high the company had done work around the neighborhood so I decided it would be worth while to have quality work done. Max was on the job site less than 1% of the time. The workers cut corners on almost everything - slapping caulk in every concievable space to eliminate replacing the wood that I had paid to have replaced. Warped boards were slathered in caulk and the house was not appropriately sanded so the paint looks terrible. The worse issue was they used razor blades to remove the window caulking and would just throw the razor blades down. I found over 30 rusted blades on my patio and in my grass - in fact I am still finding them. I shudder to think what can happen if a lawnmower hits one of them or a child steps on one of them! I eventually had to hire my maintenance man to come to the house on a weekly basis and check the work they had done, put blue tape on all of the areas that needed to be addressed. We did this for almost a month and still they were not getting everything completed. What was to have been a 6 week job lasted more than 3 months and there were over 20 outstanding issues Finally I told Max that I had an estimate from my maintenance man and we were going to have him do it and deduct it from their final payment. There are still things I am finding that they didn't do - I removed some bushes in the front and found out that they had not painted behind them. The porch floor paint peeled within a month and it is obvious that they did not sandblast because you can see the original color of the paint (which would have been blasted away if they actually had done what I paid for them to do). The pier replacement under my dining room was apparently just them shoving some matches under the post like you would do with a wobbly table. Just a nightmare. Later I asked my next door neighbor why she thought they seemed to do better work for her. She is retired and she said that it was because she was home all day every day watching everything they did and would catch all the issues as they happened. Since I work and wasn't home to supervise them it was hard to stay on top of them. Of course that is why I paid Max - he was the general contractor and for his fee he should have supervised them. I told him this many times and it was just one excuse after another. In the end my maintenance man ended up being more of a job supervisor than Max - of course that cost me double. My email and phone calls for them to address the issues have either not been returned or some date in the future is promised...that of course comes and goes. Honestly this was the worse experience I have ever had with a contractor.