Natural Stone Surfaces

I was the victim of my own greed. Tom seemed very nice and gave us an amazing price on the work he agreed to do. I did not do my homework and check references or license numbers. He was very kind to our cat...Did not mess with our stuff...Did some "extras" like installing a new lockset and extending recessed lighting into the living area. He had some good ideas for the design. Tom started the project in July, and the kitchen was functional within two months, took him that long because he showed up less and less reliably, with stranger and stranger excuses. Cracked the cooktop when he installed it. When I lost patience with his excuses for not contacting the distributor to replace it found out that the disrtributor didn't know a contractor by that name. That was not until November, but more went on before then. My son came home from work to find the strung-out girlfriend of Tom's plumber asleep on our couch. The plumber forgot to use a bucket when he disconnected the pipes of our old sink and they used my new bath linens to mop it up. And the plumber damaged the pull-down on the expensive Kohler faucet that I had bought for the kitchen. I had to bring in another plumber to fix that and something else...(coming later) Well, the pantry closet was gutted and and Tom was to install a very expensive slide-out pantry that I bought along with new hookups for my stackable W/D combo. The hookups do work fine, but the pantry did not get installed, the closet was left as an unfinished gouge in the wall, the soffit that was supposed to be built to cover the ducts was not built, and the bricks around the outside portion of the pipe were not sealed with mortar. By this time it was November, we had called the appliance distributor, and they made good on the damage to the cooktop. I'm guessing that the salesperson had gotten in trouble and had called Tom. We never saw Tom again. I called an old contact to finish the job and to bring a plumber to fix the faucet and... It was the coldest week of the year, and that's how we found out that Tom lied to us about insulating the pipes in the outside wall. Oh, yes, we sprang a leak... It cost a few thousand more to fix everything up, the slideout pantry is being donated to Community Forklift, and I expect more to come to light as time passes, like the chunk missing from the granite countertop that was cleverly repaired/disguised with black epoxy. It is hard to write this about someone who was always pleasant and kind to us, and I am sure he meant no harm. A friend of mine who is in health care summed it up with, "You can't hold it against him. He probably has an old head injury."