Northcoast Maintenance

I would like to start by apologising to Al S. for failing him as a contractor. I will always take responsibility when it is my fault. You can not please every customer no matter how hard you try. But you should always try to the best of your abilities. I am embarrassed by this but will fully own it. I will work hard to make sure this never happens again. I hate to say this but this customer is not telling you the complete truth. As I always say there are 3 sides to every story. Yes I did cut myself that can happen on a job. I did clean up the blood. I also did clean up some but the customer told me not to worry about the small amount of dust that he had other trades in there doing drywall and such. They had rosin paper on the floor which we left in place so the floor was protected. As far as damage to the tile, we cooperated with the folks at Porch.com who fully investigated to resolve that claim. I was told it was determined we did not damage the floor. In my personal investigation what the customer claimed as damage by us was existing from when the floor was put in. The tile damage was actually where the flooring installer originally cut it to the old opening. Unfortunately whoever did the framing for the opening had it so out of plumb and square when we installed the new door frame to be as plumb and square that is when that was determined the fraiming needed to be re-framed. The problem with the floor fell back to the original job and the fact that everything was so far out of plumb. I should have stopped the job and better explained that I really needed to tear out the old framing and some of the drywall to get the door frame properly positioned with the flooring. I should have tried to better explain this to Al but he difficult to communicate with. I will fully take blame on this as a failure of Northcoast Maintenance And would apologise to Al for his bad experience. This was my first job as a new business owner and I failed this customer by not taking better control of this job. In hindsight I should have stopped the job and explained that my original bid of $150 was not sufficient to properly repair his door. As I stated We needed to tear out the existing framing and install it plumb and level. I see the biggest problem was Al was acting as a General Contractor by hiring all these different trades but lacking the experience of a GC everything was not coordinated. What did I learn from this experience? I learned the following 2 things: When you run into a situation that requires a change order stop working and explain the situation to the customer. If they do not want to accept the change order and agree to the additional work politely explain I will not be able to finish the work and walk away. This is never a good thing but it is best to walk away with no money than to try to half a** something either way the customer is not happy. When a homeowner is acting as a GC you should politely turn away the job.