Concrete Artist

Concrete Artist aka Jesse Lee Muchow is a concrete "contractor" in the Treasure Valley area. You can find his listing on CL advertising concrete work with fairly good pictures to show for it... this is where I initially found him.

I entered into a handshake agreement with him on 07/7/20 (first mistake) that he would take care of a fairly extensive set of concrete stairs one of my clients wanted while I managed the rest of the job as the GC.
At first Jesse seemed like an upstanding guy who had experience and good attention to detail. Other than the fact that he was more than 30 minutes late to our first meeting.
After we had agreed on a price and rough start date, he requested a $3,000 check to get him rolling on materials and everything else which I agreed to. He worked roughly an hour on the job and then went full MIA for 6 days. During this period, I completed 75% of the job myself to keep the schedule rolling.

After some very overdue research on his behalf, I figured out that he was in jail and this was far from his first offense. His general contractors license was also not active which makes any job he does over $2,000 illegal.
The day he was released, three of his "friends" showed up to pick up the skid steer that had been left and made my client extremely uncomfortable. That night I called him and he wouldn't pick up the phone but texted me a long apology later explaining everything and saying he could start again ASAP.
Since the project was coming to a close and I had already decided to do it myself, I told him that I am handling it and that I would like to be reimbursed the money I had given him.
He thought this was very unfair and not cool of me to do and would not side with reason in any way. So I decided to give him a $500 break for his "troubles" and I would except $2,500 instead. He then told me the following week on two separate occasions that he would have it the next day and it never happened.
He then accused me of writing a CL ad against him which I had not done (yet) and became very hostile and blocked me. I gave him a final chance of giving me a date he could have the money or making payments or trying to reason with me in any way or I would have to take to social media and let people know to not do business with him.
Not one time throughout this whole situation did he try and offer a solution or see my side, I was always the bad guy who was being unreasonable.

I am writing this ad so that hopefully nobody else has to go through what I had to with Jesse. If you do a little research, more reviews like this one are not hard to find about Concrete Artist. It's guys and companies like this that give residential construction a bad name and it is beyond frustrating.

I cannot recommend this business. I called Jesse in late February 2016, so he could come out for a consultation for laying approximately 800 sq. ft. of stamped and died concrete around our above ground pool and separate fire pit. He proudly advertises a free consultation so we scheduled an appointment. He was 2 hours late to our initial appointment and didn't call to say there was a problem. When he arrived, I told him I thought of calling to tell him not to bother to come but changed my mind. He assured me he was reliable and this was an isolated incident. Despite the fact he wanted half the cost up front and assured me this was to protect us from liens (I researched and found this is not industry standard and probably because he doesn't maintain enough capital to do business), we agreed upon what seemed to be a very good deal. Jesse finally began the work over a week after he said he would when we were out of town and I was unable to even get in touch with him for 4 days during that time (he told me his employee took off with his phone). When I finally got in touch with him when we were out of town, he assured me the project would be done before we returned the following Thursday. He finally "finished" the project more than 2 weeks after that. I say "finished" because he never did complete the job fully or correctly as agreed upon. When I got home from being out of town and started to go over the project with him The first thing we noticed is that while preparing the ground to lay the concrete, his employees had broken limbs off one of our trees, buried several of our sprinkler heads with the permabark around the perimeter of our yard, buried several flowers around the bottom of our tree, and gotten a great deal of the permabark on our lawn. They also left their tools and supplies, including long iron rods, all over our lawn. This continued throughout the project even during the times he would not come back for days and I was unable to get in contact with him. One one occasion, I cleaned up all his equipment myself so it wouldn't get rained on and so we could mow. I didn't see or hear from him for another 3 or 4 days. When I told him about it later, he told me it was his employees fault and he was fired. Although it took him over a month to do the job, he was only here working approximately a total of 4 or 5 days. When we returned home from being out of town, I went over the project with him again and some of the details I wanted to incorporate. He came up with several ideas of his own as well. When I asked how much extra these details would cost he told me he didn't "up-charge" like other contractors. I asked him to put small river rock around the pool and along the fence for drainage, build a below ground concrete enclosure for the pool pump, and attach tie downs to the concrete around the pool for the pool cover. I reiterated several times we would be happy to pay for these extras. He insisted that's not how he does it. When he brought the rock, he brought the wrong rock and not enough of it. He had to go get more of the right rock and laid that over the other stuff. Jesse asked me 3 times for the remainder of the payment before the job was finished saying he needed to pay his employees and/or he was out of money for supplies. I told him I would pay him the rest when the job was done. When all he had left to do was finish some details on the enclosure for the pump and screw down the tie-downs I paid him. I shouldn't have, because he said he would be back to next morning at 10:30 to finish up. That was 4 days ago and I haven't heard from him and he is not answering my calls. On top of all this, the concrete itself is passable but not excellent with several small cracks he failed to seal properly even after I pointed them out to him. He also charged me an extra $100 we didn't agree upon saying it was because I changed the size of the fire pit area and it took more concrete. In reality, when they laid the forms for the fire pit area, they laid them literally within an inch of our not yet fully grown tree and not in the shape we agreed upon. When I spoke to him about it I explained I wanted it taken in on the sides and out in the back forming something of a tear drop shape, rather than a standard distance from the pit itself. All told, I wish we had paid the extra money to get the job done by one of the other businesses from which we received quotes. It would have been worth the extra money. In truth but also hoping to motivate him to do better work, I had even spoken to him during the project about possibly building a water feature for us later but nothing changed and I wouldn't hire him now to build a ring around a tree. It's too bad because Jesse seems like a nice guy, he just runs him business very unprofessionally.