We hired Minix Builders to build a second garage. I could honestly write a book on the entire experience but I’ll leave it at a few of the “highlights”.
*For starters, the 10 foot tall foundation (it was being built on the side of a hill) of the garage fell. Yes, you read that right. It 100% collapsed and could have easily killed one of our children or anyone in the yard.
The kicker was, it fell because they were short-cutting the process and didn’t put any steel bars in the block nor was there appropriate underpinning. We approached Matt with our concerns while it was being built and he said it was fine. We even spoke to one of the workers who said he mentioned this not being safe and was told Matt had underbid the job and needed to save money.
Within a few days of the foundation being up and them pouring tons of backfill into it, we started seeing a major crack. We called him again and were once dismissed.
We called the county and someone came out. He was appalled and put an immediate stop work order.
Within 1 day the entire foundation had collapsed.
(Note: At this point, the only reason they continued with the building project was that we were told by both the county and our lawyer that we needed to give them a chance to make it right. Plus, we had the county coming out verifying that everything else was done up to code.)
The second foundation was up to code - probably because Matt knew his license was on the line - and we allowed them to continue the building process.
If this isn’t enough for a bad review - wait, there’s more.
*We specifically asked for cedar siding to match our house. He got pine siding instead, saying cedar was too expensive. The thing was, he didn’t even ask or tell us he was short-cutting this, he just had it delivered and hoped we wouldn’t notice. Super shady.
*Then came the driveway debacle. We were clear that we wanted metal rods in the driveway to avoid cracking. My husband even offered to pay extra for them because we knew Matt was in way over his own head. We just wanted it done right.
Surprise, surprise. The crew came and poured the driveway with no metal. This is as we were calling the day before and the day of and Matt refused to stop the work. Then to top it off, the concrete wasn’t hot enough so it looked like a toddler was playing in it. It looked absolutely awful.
We were so tired of dealing with Matt at this point, we offered to let him walk away from the project - no lawyer, no poor reviews. We would just not pay him the remaining $20,000 so we could have someone decent come and redo the driveway properly. It seemed fair to us after everything that had happened. We had multiple quotes from people and $20k seemed the average.
He had the audacity to tell us we were being unreasonable and that he was in backwards with our job and needed the money (of course he was, he had to build the foundation twice - but this isn’t
