According to leading building experts--Drs. Straube, Bailes and Lstiburek-- there are five ways to treat the damp air in basement crawls. And only two are really effective.

As for the refusal to supply any references, makes no sense to me unless these are all startups. With that I truly sympathize!

I don't get it either- you ask the customer if they'd mind being a reference upon completion of a job. I don't find that intrusive or disrespectful to then...use them as a referral.

That's a red flag for me. During our build process so far I've asked for plenty of references - never been turned down yet!

Red flag. Red flag. Red flag.

keep looking

Unfortunately, the saga continues: the latest potential vendor will provide references but won't provide any specifics in their contract. They'll gladly tell us verbally what work they'll do and verbally describe the encapsulation products they'll use, but they won't put any of it in writing in the contract. Of course, that would make it real easy for them to escape responsibility should we discover that what they said they'd do doesn't match the work they actually did. So... NEXT!

As an aside, are there just SO MANY customers rushing these companies to spend several thousand dollars that they don't mind losing potential customers like us over bad business practices like this??

IMO-It seems as if they are willing to walk away from jobs or over price said job because they have enough to keep them busy. We need more trade driven professionals.

I'd refuse to sign a contract out of respect for my wallet.

It's not only bad business, he's cheating himself out of an excellent way to qualify potential customers. I've got a 4.65 customer satisfaction rating out of a possible 5 based on over 300 reviews over a decade. I've worked damn hard to get those people to say those nice things. If those comments mean nothing to you, you're only interested in low price, we're not right for each other.