I hired this firm to level out a sloped concrete floor in my basement. What should have been a 2-day job to level my basement floor turned into an 8.5-month saga of broken promises, blown schedules, shoddy workmanship, poor communication, dodged phone calls, and excuses.
Lavonne (the owner) initially under-bid the project, which then prompted her to take a series of shortcuts that not only made the project take far longer to complete, but also, ironically, increased her costs.
Every step of the way, she and her crew showed up very late (often an hour or more) and did very poor work. I'm not a cement mason, but I've watched enough DIY tutorials to know what doing this correctly should look like. Their inconsistent mixing and uneven results were obvious to anyone who knew what they were looking at. Lavonne was amazed when I showed her the self-leveling laser level I used to measure the accuracy of her crew's work - she had never seen anybody do that and had been trying to do the whole 20x20 floor with a 2x4. And yet, over the 8.5 months she was working on this project, she never went and bought one herself - she kept using mine.
At the end of most working days, Lavonne would try to tell me that there was only a little bit of touch up work left to do, when anybody with eyes and/or a ruler could see that the floor looked terrible and was still way out of spec. On the third round of attempted repairs, when I asked her what the plan was for the day and she told me, again, that it was just some touch up work, I sent her home to figure out what it would take to actually fix the job, because fixing variations of 1/2" or more over a couple feet isn't just some touch-up work. She wound up not coming back for months.
Ultimately, she did come back and finish the job, but only after months of cancellations (including two at 9:00pm the night before she was due to start), and excuses about not having enough money to cover the rest of the materials. The final fix-up job took 4 days and while the floor is technically within the specs of our agreement, it's still very lumpy and looks terrible. I could have done at least as good a job myself, in less time, for less money. And I'm still going to have to rent a grinder to sand and polish the whole floor in order to finish it.
The way this project should have proceeded would have had a small crew do one day of prep/conditioning, a larger crew do a second day of pouring, and maybe a third day of touch up, if needed. Lavonne and her crew were at my house for at least 11 days total.
