R G Construction

The owner of this business did not complete my job. He also walked away from my job and took money without performing the work he agreed to do. He works only to his own time line and does not care about the customers time line--this cost me a lot in carrying costs in the property. He is very poor at meeting deadlines. I have left many phone calls and desire to work out a reasonable ending to our agreement, but still have no explanation of why he did not complete the work on my home. It appears that I paid him too much in advance in one of the project draws and he decided to walk. He was paid for 83% of the job and only completed approximately 65-70% of the work. The quality of his work appeared to be generally fair to good but as new contractors came in and picked up where he left off there were some issues like in adequate air flow vents for the central HVAC, missed painted areas, some cracked drywall, doors that won't close properly, minor code issues (all corrected by someone else). There was a large antique kitchen oven vent that we wanted to save. He removed it and told us it wasn't any good so he got rid of it. He didn't have permission to get rid of this. To me common sense and courtesy would say to keep it a let the owners decide what to do with it. This was a small part of the overall project but I suppose his disregard for our feelings in this matter should have been a sign of things to come. My only option now appears to be legal action. Fortunately I do have a written agreement which I hope a court will enforce, but do not look forward to going through this process. If for some reason you want to take the risk of hiring him, don't pay this individual anything until he does the work. He will ask for advance payments--say no. He seemed like a good guy to do the job but obviously I was simply taken in and/or it became too much for him and he simply wouldn't admit it and dragged the job out as long as he could before quitting. He appears to be a very slick operator--potential customers beware! After I paid him the second to last draw (before he walked) he told me: " Don't worry, I always complete my jobs, and my goal is to give you a turnkey house." Another address this individual uses is 3727 Ticonderoga, San Antonio, Texas 78230. REBUTTAL TO RG CONSTRUCTION COMPANY RESPONSE: Roger Delgado of RG Construction Company agreed to repair our property for a total of $30,000 (this amount is on his letterhead on the bid he e-mailed to us - copy can be provided). His estimated time of completion was 6-8 weeks from the time he started - October 2011. By July 2012 the work was still not completed and by then we had paid him $25,000, and we had to hire new contractors. According to his rebuttal, he offered to do the work for $35,000 and he says we paid him $32,000. We have copies of all the cancelled checks endorsed by Mr. Delgado. Since we had not had any experience with his quality of work, we were leery of paying him $8K as he requested for the first draw, and he agreed to $2K for his partial pay first draw - invoice dated 15 Oct 2011. We told him we would pay him as the work was finished. He was paid as follows: 15 Oct 2011- 2K 17 Oct - 4K 24 Oct - 4K 23 Nov - 4K 9 Dec - 5K 16 Mar 2012 - 6K As far as the additional problems he says he encountered, a professional contractor such as he claimed to be should have foreseen problems a 63 year old house would have, and would have planned accordingly. He inspected the house thoroughly before giving us a bid, so he should have known what to expect. He had four workers initially, and they did some of the drywall work and other minor jobs. But then every time we went to the site he was working by himself, and the impression he gave us was that he preferred to do this as opposed to paying others to do the work. I told him repeatedly that we were paying insurance on a vacant house and it was getting to be very expensive. We told him in no uncertain terms that he needed to bring more contractors in to expedite the job. It fell on deaf ears. He wouldn't show up for weeks at a time - this was verified by people living near this property - but also because when we went to see the progress, we could see he hadn't done anything . He started giving us excuse after excuse. He bought two 5-gallon cans of paint for the exterior of the house and then it sat in the house for 4 weeks. He had a different excuse each time I asked him when he was going to start painting. Finally, on 4 July, I took the paint out of the house and gave it to other contractors to paint the exterior - we had to keep the work going so we could sell this house. As for his "equipment and supplies" that he says were removed from the house, they consisted of some wire left in the pantry, an old dry-wet vac, two sawhorses, some old rags, buckets, cleaning fluids, and an old radio. I removed all of this because people wanted to see the house and I needed to clean it up. I called him and asked when he was going to go and work on the house as we hadn't seen him for weeks. Again, he had excuses - his daughter had been sick, he had been sick, etc. This is when he went to the house to try to retrieve his belongings. He did this only because he knew he was never going to finish this project - he just quit. He was able to go inside the house - we have never changed the locks - we just changed the security code. He called us and we told him we had his things. To this day, he has not bothered to come and retrieve them. In fairness to Mr. Delgado, he did a great job on the projects he worked on. But it would not have taken as long as he did if he had had 4 workers as he says he did. He was attempting to work on a 3 bedroom, 1 bath home that needed major renovation by himself. Time was of the essence as my insurance costs were looming because the house was vacant for so long and I told him this repeatedly. Each time he promised it would be ready "in a couple of weeks." I have since had to hire other contractors to finish work that he bid on but did not complete. We would not recommend RG Construction Company to anyone needing major work done on a project. Again, we have all the necessary documentation to back up this rebuttal.