Terrible work - had to fire them!:
I hired Socelvic to do a renovation of my apartment that included a complete redo of one bathroom, build a new bathroom, move a wall, and a variety of painting, carpentry, plumbing, and electrical work. Socelvic was the contractor and I went with their electrical and plumbing subs.
The project was a disaster. They did demolition on my apartment and did a terrible job of cleaning up. There was debris everywhere and the job site was unsafe and filthy. After demolition, they went away and did no work for 6 weeks. As this was a rental apartment, time was of the essence since I was losing rental income. They didn't seem to care about my schedule. There was very little communication. My calls, texts, and emails were only sporadically answered. Once the work began in earnest, the quality of the workmanship was terrible. They didn't protect my wood floors, so they got all scratched and needed to be refinished. Even though I gave them a detailed spreadsheet of the items to order for the renovation, they ordered and installed the wrong parts. They told me that they could get me a discount off Home Depot prices, but when I saw the purchase order, the prices were actually higher than if I ordered the items myself. They had no consistent crew working on the job, so I had to explain what I needed over and over. Junior Vicente was rarely at the site, so I had to talk directly with workers that spoke little or no English to explain what needed to be done. They put in a sewer vent pipe through the roof of the house and never sealed it off with a boot, so water leaked in through three floors of the house. Drywall was installed with huge gaps between the boards and insufficient nails. Electrical rough work was done even after the rough inspection. Waterproofing placed on shower walls was actually peeling off the wall. They installed tile over the peeling water proofing and unsealed wall boards. They told me that rough inspections were done and insisted that I pay 80% of the contract value upon rough completion. Unfortunately, I paid it. But the quality of the work was so bad, that I finally had to fire them. I checked in with the building inspector after I fired them, and found out that they had not done the rough inspection after all. They did rough electrical and rough plumbing, but not the building and fireproofing inspection. And they had closed all the walls, which are not supposed to be closed until the building inspection. The inspector required that I rip out all the walls in the bathrooms to inspect. When the walls were removed, we saw that there was insufficient insulation, no fire stopping in the pipe chase, cut studs that were not properly reinforced, and no vent piping from the bathroom ventilation units. I had to pay another contractor to do demolition, and then fix all the problems. I had to buy new ventilation units (the ones I had specified in the first place), all new tile (since the tiled walls had to be demolished. I lost thousands of dollars having to fix the mess they made. And to add insult to injury, I tried suing in Small Claims Count and Junior Vicente didn't show up twice when trials were scheduled. Please, please, please DO NOT hire Socelvic. I hope no one has to go through what I just went through.
by mary on May 11, 2017