OMG! This is awful. I may be time for you to pull in another contractor and kiss Juan goodbye. That is insanity. Please keep us posted.

Hi there,

We used Juan for a window replacement 3 years ago when we bought our home. He did a wonderful job on the window, but demanded an additional $400 beyond the agreed-upon price of $800 to finish the job. He doesn’t do contracts, since English is a second language and we knew this was a risk going in, but still I thought holding our project hostage to milk out more money was egregious and unethical. We eventually had to let him go.

Hope your kitchen remodel has a happy ending (we added a bathroom while I was 35 weeks pregnant with my first, so I feel your pain)! And congratulations on your little one!!

Juan did some work for us a few years back. I confronted him about going way over budget and then asked him about all the supplies he bought that disappeared from my job and it was a horrible situation. I caught him buying double the paint stripper and other supplies that he then took somewhere else and tried to charge me for.

At the end of the job he took all of the left over stripper, paint, and supplies with him even though we had other rooms that needed to be done that we could have saved to use the supplies on.(Supplies I paid for.)

The sad thing for us it that he does great work and we regretted losing his workers… the assistants that really did the majority of the work because he was really only here about 1/4 of the time.

This job also went way over budget and then on top of that he tried to charge me an extra $500 in supplies at the end after I had already told him that I would not be paying any more. I told him he could bring back all the extra supplies which he never did.

This whole situation resulted in several drunken phone calls from him. (There was always Alcohol on his breathe I’m afraid.)