Advanced General Construction

If I could leave negative stars, I would. Whatever you do, DO NOT hire Guillermo Rosas of Advanced General Construction.

I ended up making that mistake, and am paying for it now. I hired Guillermo back in November of 2017 to convert the garage of our house into a permitted studio apartment. After having an engineer draw up plans, I had Guillermo come out to provide an estimate. While he made it clear that he did not know the exact number since it would be based on the inspector, he did provide me with a range of $10k-13k...and boy was he wrong!!!! The garage had been previously converted, and the estimate was provided based on the additional work involved. Guillermo had claimed that he had done several of these types of projects before, and seemed like he knew what he was talking about (he even said that he knew the inspector in our area). So you can imagine my surprise when the inspector came and said that EVERYTHING had to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch. Now mind you, I still would have done the work, but it would have been nice to know that there was the possibility of the inspector saying what he did. The news meant an extra $10k of costs (which I did not budget for) plus the potential for additional costs as the extra $10k only included things for bringing the unit to code, and not for other items (such as replacing flooring, backsplash, yard work fixing, etc.). To cut to the chase, the whole project ended up costing me almost $30k - ooops and Just concluded during the first week of April.

I wish that was the worst of it, but his communication skills were absolutely atrocious - and I don’t mean the language barrier. As the project seemed to be getting to a close, I kept hearing from Guillermo that we were almost done. First we were supposed to finish during the first week of January, then third week of January, then beginning of February....and I kept believing him - seems like at some point I should have learned my lesson. We had to tell several of our friends who were counting on staying with us that they would need to find other accommodations at the last minute.

Finally, in the middle of February, I was told that the final inspection had happened and that we were done - hooray! Or so I thought.

As we were reviewing the “final” details, Guillermo casually mentioned that the only thing that was left was some form that needed to be filled out, and that I did not need to worry about it (and fortunately I filed that little bit of news away). Because over the next few weeks my Certificate of Occupancy kept not arriving. And while I kept waiting on that, there was the punch-list items that he was supposed to finish - cosmetic work that needed to be done as a result of this process. These were not overly complicated - fix a broken paver stone, restring string lights, get the bathroom drawer to close, paint the stucco to match the rest of the house - but we’re eyesores that he promised me would be remedied. There was also another project that I needed done for which he quoted me $700. Now if you’ve read until this point, you are probably thinking - why in the word would you have him do anything else for you!!! And the reason is because as annoying as this process was, Guillermo was at least showing up and appeared to be working hard.

It was after I wrote the check for $700 that he disappeared on me. Other than 2 text messages claiming that he would come to finish the work (which goes without saying he never did), I never heard from him again. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I tried calling/texting every day for about a month, with absolutely no response. And since I never received the Certificate of Occupancy, I had to reach out to the architect to help me get the issue resolved. It turned out that the missing form was the Contractor Certification that the insulation that was installed was complainant with the building code - and only the Contractor could fill it out!

Well, when the contractor stops responding to any communication attempts, that puts you in a bit of a bind :). Fortunately for me the engineer of this project was able to reach out to the city inspector and have issue resolved. I now have the Certificate of Occupancy, but I also have about 5 months of headaches, worry and bad experiences.

As a postscript, I called Guillermo a month later from a phone of a friend. He picked up and as soon as I gave him my name, he literally hung up the phone and did not pick up any subsequent phone calls.