ComplaintsforRestoration Contractors LLC

• Initial Complaint

  07/09/2023

  Complaint Type:

  Service or Repair Issues

  Status:

  Answered

  More info

  I hired ******************* and his company to restore and improve the main level and finished basement of my home after a plumbing pipe failed during the night and flooded both areas. The floor on the main level was carpeted with very old material. I wanted to upgrade that floor to solid wood. The flooring contractor sent a man to do the job. He removed material that looked like concrete from the dining room area. I asked what he was doing. He said he was removing of self- leveling material. The removal of this substance was not mentioned in the contract of work to be done, nor was its existence explained, but I was not an expert and assumed the flooring contractors new what they were doing. The floor was installed and looked wonderful. After all the furniture was brought in and I was hanging pictures in the dining room, I felt the marked slope in the dining room that had not been there before. ************ blames this on the flooding water. The floor was LEVEL prior to the demolition done by the flooring contractor sent by ************. This is the worst example of **************** behavior. I would not trust or hire ************ again - ever - for anything. His company and representatives treated me as if I was an unreasonable person. They treated my belongings shabbily. They ruined two sets of draperies, broke dishes, put things back together wrong, stacked things in my garage in an unsafe manner that fell on my head and required five staples to close the wound in my scalp. The man who was supposed to be in charge of the whole project promised to file documents with my insurance company to recover depreciation. This has not been done. ************ seems to have decided that his responsibility to me is over. He would not even discuss these issues with me. He filled a lien on my property to try to collect 2% of the agreed upon price that I withheld to try to have leverage with these issues. I wish I had never heard of this company.

  

  Business response

  07/26/2023

  See attached

  Customer response

  08/04/2023

  In response to *************** comments referring my complaint. 

  Bullet 1: Yes, I signed an agreement to have Restoration Contractors to restore and improve my home after a plumbing failure flooded the main floor and seeped through the floor to the finished area of the basement ruining carpet, ceiling and walls. 

  Bullet 2: I did request work done beyond the scope of the insurance claim. I had only been owner of the house since November of 2021 and decided to make improvements to the property.

  Bullet 3: I have no complaint about the final product delivered by *********** and Restoration Contractors. The process of arriving at the completed project was anything but easy.

  OK, too many bullet points that are redundant and laughable. 

  The Project Manager *********** sent to be in charge of my project was *********************. *********** was clearly not capable and informed me that repeatedly that I was not his only client and I would just have to understand that. I called twice that I know of and complained about various aspects of *************** performance. I spoke with ******* in the Restoration Contractors office. She expressed surprise and offered sympathy but that seemed to be it. I never heard from *********** and *************** behavior did not change. *********** did not come to my house ONCE to make sure progress was being made. I was never informed about progress, who was showing up to do what work or when. Frequently, men would show up to work at 8 AM and *********** would call me at 8:30 AM to tell me they were coming. His organizational skills were a joke and *********** never helped him or me through this. The first painters and drywall companies who were here were, apparently, fired with new individuals starting over. The whole thing was a nightmare and I had no confidence that anything would change. I felt I had no recourse but to forge ahead.

  Since I am not a contractor and am not familiar with the building trade, I hired Restoration Contractors to handle the overall job of restoring my home. I had never heard of self-leveling concrete. I asked *****, the flooring guy of PSI Flooring, what he was doing. He said he was removing this stuff and he would then start laying the hardwood floor. I thought he was the expert and was doing the job asked of him. The job proceeded in fits and starts. The holidays came and went and, frankly, I didn't want to deal with it any more than they apparently did. 

  Finally, I got in touch with *********** who told me he was no longer associated with Restoration Contractors. 

  At this point, *********** came to my house and walked through the job with me writing down things that needed to be finished. I had discovered the slant in the dining room floor once the whole job was close to completion when I was hanging pictures back up not long before *********** was here. *********** APOLOGIZED for *************** performance and promised to "make it up to me". This is how he does it. He is blatantly lying. The floor did not slant before the self-leveler was removed from the dining room floor. The insurance adjustor for ************************* ***************************, did not find the sub-floor to be destroyed or damaged. No mention of this was in her report.

  I had tried to forge ahead and make the best of this situation. I have paid *********** $73,000 for a job that has been fraught with angst, headaches and lies. I spoke with him on the telephone but he would not be quiet and let me explain anything - he just kept yelling at me and demanding payment. I only brought up the other things I suffered through to prove my point that *********** is only interesting in HIS point of view. He says he is a "pay as you go company". I do indeed feel sorry for him if my $2000 is making or breaking his business. During this time, I have been caregiver for my husband of 43 years and was dealing with placing him in assisted living/memory care. I thought I was hiring a professional who would take care of the job for me since I was dealing with a spouse diagnosed with a rare, degenerative neurological illness - Corticobasal Degeneration and spinocerebellar ataxia. I was willing to pay for services rendered. Not one of his services came without some other kind of cost. 

   

  Customer response

  08/16/2023

  ******* from Restoration Contractors LLC emailed me to say that the flooring contractor would remove the slanting dining room floor, put down a floor leveling contract and then replace the wood floor at no cost to me. I am very appreciative that this was arranged. The floor is now much better.

  There is only one last issue to be fixed. The closet door in the basement will no longer close as it did before this project. I will contact ******* about this 

  Thank you very much for helping.

  *******

   

• Initial Complaint

  02/05/2023

  Complaint Type:

  Order Issues

  Status:

  Resolved

  More info

  Signed contract with restoration contractors 8/30/2022. Work did not begin until January 9th, 2023. Insurance has paid RC $23,690.27 of a $33,134.34 estimate. My obligation is $1,000 but its my house, personal property, and family's well-being that RC has put at risk with extreme incompetence. This project was budgeted for 2 weeks, and we are going on week 5 as of 2/6/2023. Utilities to my house were disconnected for what was supposed to be less than a week. That was before the deep freeze Colorado had last week. However, the prolonging of this job exposed my house to the extreme cold, risking other functionality and personal property. RC refused to protect my house from the cold resulting from the utilities they removed. RC did not follow the agreed upon scope of work with myself and insurance. At this point, I estimate they did not nor plan to perform approximately $7,201 of work billed. From what has been done, the workmanship is very poor and I have evidence of numerous flaws. RC billed for sub-contractor rates but instead provided us with a handyman who did 90% of the work on his own. There were rarely two people working at the house at any given time. They showed up late every day, and some days not at all. And that's is th emain contributor to why this project has reached week 5 with no end in sight.

  

  Business response

  03/04/2023

  I emailed this word doc yesterday, on 3/3/23 to ******* ********** and *********** ******* at the BBB office.  I'm posting it here again. 

  Customer response

  03/15/2023

  I've attached to this email *****'s response with comments debunking many of his claims, plus a response of my own at the end.

  

  Business response

  05/03/2023

  Dear Mr. ********

   

  We appreciate you admitting that you delayed the job for nearly 2 months “until after the holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years).  You have every right to do that, as you said, but your original complaint “Signed contract with restoration contractors 8/30/2022. Work did not begin until January 9th, 2023” was exaggerated to the point where it made it look like we did absolutely no work for many months.  That is just not accurate at all.    

   

  Another point regarding your statement that you are not preventing us from doing the flooring is that your requested settlement from the BBB on your original complaint was: “ Refund; Immediate termination of contract and cease of work, so that a more competent contractor can finish.”  We therefore consider it to be a fact that you did not want us to do any more work on the flooring.  You essentially prevented us from doing any further work with that statement, and we agree that we don’t want to do any more work for you.  We just want to reconcile with you fairly for the work we did and let you find someone else to finish the flooring and any other remaining work. 

   

  It is clear to us that your expectations of how ALL companies need to perform to make you happy is perfection, as you stated in your most recent reply below:

   

  “The reason I make such a big deal out of the working days and hours is because, EVERY company that has done work on my house – electrical, concrete, siding, etc. – arrived on the start date first thing in the morning, worked all day and every day of the week weather permitting, like all reputable construction companies do. Here’s the best part, when we finally moved back in (before the work was done because it had been over a month at this point), even our neighbors would comment “we hardly ever saw anyone there working”, and “we thought you would be out for months at that rate”. Any of those three neighbors will happily comment on our behalf.

   

  We are sorry that we did not achieve a perfect service level for you *****. We sincerely understand that from the time of the water damages happening in the first place, this has not been a fun process.  We do try to make the process as effortless as possible for our customers, and we hope you don’t have any more water damage events to deal with in the future.

   

  After the abatement work was done, we worked as quickly as possible to get your job done for you and took a little over 2 weeks, not over a month…as you again inaccurately stated in your reply.  We never promised you a hard deadline of 10 business days and we were not in breach of contract if the job took 15 business days.  The fact is that the overall job timeline, once you let us start the physical work in mid-January, was typical for jobs like this.  Your standards are extremely high to say the least if you expect people there at all hours of your choosing.  We use subcontractors for a lot of the work we do, and we don’t set their schedule.  They schedule with the customers, so your expectation of people working from 8:01 to 5pm every day is just not at all realistic.  The HVAC sub-contractor on your job had to delay the job 4 days due to an emergency call for example.  That alone accounted for most of the extra few days that it took to finish the job and that was not in our control.  I’m sorry that you had a water damage event, but they can be a big inconvenience no matter how hard we try to put it back together as fast as possible for a customer.

  I don’t mean to attack you, however, for 13 years now and hundreds of jobs we have not had a single complaint to the BBB like yours just for the work taking around 3 weeks rather than 2 weeks.  We did not promise a deadline in the contract, so we did not breach our contract with you.  We have worked hard for that 13 years (4,745 days) to not have any complaints, so we will defend false statements such as “Signed contract with restoration contractors 8/30/2022. Work did not begin until January 9th, 2023” to the grave.  We now realize that you expect absolute perfection from contractors, or else you feel that you have a right to try to ruin their company with lies as if we deserve it.  Our job is not easy, especially considering your drywall contained asbestos and that there were issues regarding the wall and flooring that were not typical.  For the record, repairing a home after water or fire damages have occurred is way harder than new construction.     

   

  As you stated in your reply above:

   

  “I've never claimed to know anything about how insurance works, in fact I never want to. However, it seems reasonable to me that the money you were and will be paid for work you didn't actually do, should go back to the sender, no? I'm no legal expert but that seems like fraud to me, at the very least very shady.” 

   

  Thank you for admitting that you are not familiar with how the insurance restoration process works.  We understand and based on your comments like the ones above, we believe you, because as I tried to explain to you a few times now, money does not get returned to the insurance company but either goes to you or us for the work done.  We have been doing this work since 2010 and we DO NOT EVER do anything fraudulent or shady, period.  We follow Colorado Law to the letter. 

   

  We use Xactimate software and pricing in our estimates, which has been the industry standard for over 20 years when it comes to writing estimates for insurance companies.  Please understand that all pricing is generated from this software and is not made up by us.  The price lists inside the software are updated every month to all insurance companies and to all contractors that pay for the Xactimate services and regularly use it.  This is why insurance companies approve our estimates usually very quickly, however, your insurance company began using a different software last year in an effort to not pay out as much on claims, which means that we have to negotiate with them on that point as well.  They are basically burning customers on a national scale with their new tactic to save money and be more profitable.  This takes longer and requires more work on our part and we therefore don’t handle claims with your insurance company anymore for that reason.  We will still try our best to work with them for our final reconciliation purposes, which still needs to be done to close out your file. 

   

  Even now there are still errors in your claim paperwork that we have been trying to speak with your insurance adjuster about, however, he has not replied to our emails or phone calls over the last several weeks.  Over a month ago we sent him a copy of our contract with you and asked him to send us a copy of your most recent estimate and he never sent it.  My office manager has left messages also.  One remaining error is clearly that the closet in the hallway where asbestos containing drywall was removed and replaced is not even drawn on the sketch within your claim paperwork.  So, the numbers related to the work that we did in there have not yet been added to your claim.  That is a clear error that must be addressed with your insurance company because if they don’t pay for that work, we would have to bill you for it.  I’m sure you would rather us get that closet added onto the approved estimate so that you are not responsible for the expense personally.  There are a few other errors in your claim paperwork that still need to be corrected for us all to have a fair resolution. We will send up our revised estimate and hope he can help us all to resolve these issues quickly.  This is evidently the same adjuster that my project manager had a slow and difficult time working with before the holidays, and between them they still managed to NOT get it right. We may need your help in getting your adjuster to respond to us so we can reconcile the closet and other issues with him asap.

   

  Clearly, we don’t agree on a lot of points, but it doesn’t do us any good to go back and forth on all these issues with you.  All we want is a fair and accurate final reconciliation with you at this point and we are sure you want the same as well.  Since you admitted that you don’t really know how the insurance restoration process is supposed to work under Colorado Law, and we do not want there to be ANY misunderstandings in our final reconciliation, we would like to have a 3rd party arbitrate a fair resolution for all parties.  Since we are a proud member of the BBB, we know it is in the best interest of all parties for us to call the BBB and have them reach out to you in the next few days to initiate their formal dispute resolution process.  This is a free service to all of us since we are a member of the BBB.  This will be the first and only time we have ever used this free service as a member of the BBB having done many hundreds of jobs since 2010 in the Denver area.  We have always strived to be fair and do what is right with our customers, suppliers, and vendors and all we want is for this matter to be resolved in a way that is fair for all parties. 

   

  We have nothing to hide and have done nothing wrong. We hope you will accept the BBB’s invitation to arbitration so we can get all the issues resolved fairly for the benefit of all parties.  WE have reached out to the BBB and asked them to contact you, so they should be reaching out to you by email or phone call very soon.  We apologize that the restoration process has been difficult in your case.  We don’t want there to be any misunderstandings in our final reconciliation with you.  We look forward to going through this process with you so we can all put it behind us and know it was done correctly. 

   

  Thank you. 

   

  Customer response

  05/08/2023

  [A default letter is provided here which indicates your acceptance of Arbitration. If you wish, you may update it before sending it.]

  Better Business Bureau:

  I have reviewed the response made by the business in reference to complaint ID .********, , and find that arbitration is necessary.

  Sincerely,

  *************************

*Some consumers may elect to not publish the details of their complaints, some complaints may not meet BBB's standards for publication, or BBB may display a portion of complaints when a high volume is received for a particular business. ↩