Ed Oteri did not give us the best price, but it was competitive. The week before the project was to start, Ed came and looked at the porch again. He went to the second level porch that was going to be demolished and noticed that there weren’t any cedar shingles on the INSIDE of the porch (where the deck was going to be). He told me that was going to cost extra because he hadn’t accounted for this. I found this to be very odd, especially since the lower porch was the same way and he had seen it several times. I let that one slide.
The next week things were going fine. Oteri’s guys showed up on time, worked hard, and were actually ahead of schedule after 3 weeks. But during week 4 they stopped working and were only showing up a few days per week, sometimes not even for the whole day. One week they just did not come. The original estimate of 4 weeks ended up being closer to 15 weeks which was a major inconvenience for us. At first Ed was very responsive to emails and phone calls, but after this third week he was hard to get a response from. It seemed clear that he had started another project and was making my project very low priority.
They left the half finished porch basically unchanged for 5 weeks. It rained very hard that spring, and they did not put plastic over the open windows, and they left the air conditioner power switch sitting in a muddy puddle. I called and emailed several times before they came and put plastic over the windows and lifted the power switch off of the ground.
They also left am overflowing dumpster in our driveway for weeks after the demo was complete, and the contents of the dumpster was NOT only from our project.
A few months after they finished the plaster around with windows started to crack. I called and emailed Ed to come fix this several times, often with no response. He told me over and over that he would come “next week” to fix this, but he never came. Our new room now has plaster cracks around the windows and doorway, I gave up on contacting him.
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