Baldo Design Build

Joe worked on a $160,000 remodel of my small home in Skokie. Joe is not a bad guy. He is just slow, forgetful and he often brings in guys who are not qualified to perform the work. Joe has no employees. Joe is skilled and a good trouble shooter but rarely does the work himself. Joe typically showEd up at some point in the morning with materials to check in with his guys. Joe sometimes disappeared for days when he could not find people to work for him. He usually did not let me know when he was not going to show up at my job site. Often he did not return my texts. On a few occasions during my job he lost his phone and he made it plain that he does not like to use email. I think his poor customer service skills are the result of his business being mostly about projects he does for himself.

His estimates of cost are on the higher end of normal but his estimates of time are very poor. My 4 month job became a 10 month job — 6 weeks of which were caused by his poor coordination with his architect and the City.

Joe ran a very dirty job site and allowed debris to remain in my house that caused damage as it was moved around from room to room to accommodate work. Even the debris that was moved outside sat for days and weeks causing damage to my landscaping and pavers. This was made worse by the the fact that Joe did not properly protect floors or trim in the house so an abnormal amount of damage occurred even after I warned him of my concern and identified the area of concern in person and in writing. He told me his crew did not follow his instructions — which could be true — but it went on for months. My vinyl floors were trashed by the workers dragging grit and materials over them. He tried to fix them with mismatched vinyl flooring that looked OK in shadowy light but not so great with good light. I now need to constantly apply scratch cover to mask the deep scratches they left. The upstairs wood floors were scratched and covered with drips of everything. In particular, the spattering of varnish drops on the kitchen and closet floors could not be fixed. He offered to get me a “good price” for his floor guy to redo them but I felt he should have been responsible for them. His crew also somehow put a handful of rags into the pipes they were working on that ended up blocking the drain line to the sewer cause water to back-up in my laundry room. I don’t believe Joe would have allowed this but his crew operates unsupervised for most of the day so weird things happen. His crew also lost parts to my oven, the remote controls to my master bedroom lights and damaged the bullnose trim on my expensive stainless steel stove vent fan unit. The lenses on my solar tubes were also scratched from mishandling.

Joe mostly does flips and has a crew of guys he uses to do flip type work. On my job, the roofer, electrician, drywall and plumber were decent subs. The guy who did the paver and driveway work was fantastic. The painter was not a professional painter and was more of a painter for lower end rental properties. A big part of my job was window replacement. Joe was unclear about who his window guy was but by the end it became clear that there was no window guy at all. Joe did the windows with his crew so I will not be getting a typical window warranty on the work and can’t be sure if they will hold up. Same thing with the custom cabinet guy. There was no custom cabinet guy as promised. My cabinets were field built from generic contractor grade plus boxes. They turned out pretty nice aside from the paint job. The carpenters were a mixed lot. The tile guy did a very sloppy job in my master bathroom but not so bad upstairs and in the kitchen.

Joe is not a bad guy. He has good ideas and is very knowledgeable. He is a good troubleshooter but he has to be since he is always scrambling as surprising things often happened. I like a little lead time to pick things out but Joe is more of a wake-up and head to Home Depot and “see what they have“ kind of contractor. Clearly some of my disappointment is because I am very detailed oriented and organized and do not like the style of shooting from hip every day. I have done one new build and three down-to-the stud remodels. This was by far the strangest experience I have had working with a contractor. Other clients of Joe’s might have had better experiences. Having said that, I am sure that most people would not like the constant chaos and mess, the damage, the poor (sometimes to the point of rude) communication, the forgetfulness and the inconsistent skills of his crew and subcontractors.