Forever Awnings

In 2016 we purchased two Alumawood awnings from Forever Awnings, LLC giving them the required 50% deposit...$6,000. (We now know other companies require only 35% deposit). Initially the stepson salesman promised our work would be done within 8 weeks which we later learned was TOTALLY unrealistic. He even wrote this in the contract which is the only reason we signed. We thought this was a family business but as the weeks & months passed we learned that the owner, William Weber, actually works full time in another industry. Awning building is a distraction for him and he is careless with important details. He has completely relinquished management duties to three other employees who do not keep him informed about the day-to-day operations and customer frustration that occurs. We also learned they have only one crew while alternative dealers have up to 8-9 experienced crews and would have completed our project much faster. The owner lists himself as an engineer yet on both of our projects the engineering plans came back with major errors.... that WE caught... thank god. On one set of plans after we pointed out the error, Weber resubmitted them to his engineer and then forwarded the revised plans back to us. Remarkably, he still did not check the plans and important errors still had not been corrected. If we had not been diligent about finding these engineering errors our building permits would have been wrong. We would have had to pay to get them corrected or live with a structure we did not specify in our contracts. We can only imagine how much grief/expense we would have endured. We feel this lack of engineering oversight was major contractor malpractice. It shows that this careless owner sets the tempo of the entire operation. If you use this company, be prepared to learn how to read engineering specifications because you will be responsible to find the errors. Mr. Weber is asleep at the switch. Then after waiting nearly 6 months, while digging a footing hole, a laborer carelessly severed a critical drainpipe. That pipe connected to a downspout running under our expensive raised paved patio. We had asked him to be careful to isolate the drainpipe and protect it but that did no good. The foreman's suggested repair was to wrap a trash bag around this pipe and duct tape it. This downspout serves 15% of our large roof and we had 100% chance of rain each hour for 24 hours starting 12 hours later. We (an elderly couple, 65+ years old) had to fix this totally avoidable damage ourselves to protect our patio from being undermined by high PSI roof water eroding the compact. Over that 24 hours we received 1 1/2 inches of rain. Over 6 months, more than half of the time when they said they would come for work they did not show and they NEVER CALLED TO TELL US their plans had changed. This was rude and disruptive. We had lost all confidence in this company which was inconsiderate, carless and negligent. After the drainpipe damage we were left with a dangerous gaping hole in our patio, which they refused to properly repair. They did not call or return for 6 consecutive days which was abandonment so we terminated our relationship. The owner kept $4,000 of our deposit for digging 3 holes, filling 2 with concrete and posts and putting up a ledger on one side of our home. We received absolutely no credit for this "work" and because other dealers in Reno knew the bad reputation of Forever Awnings. We had to pay significantly more to get another dealer to complete this project and accept the liability. We started our project in May but thanks to the many delays caused by Forever Awnings, its owner, its engineer, its salesman, its foreman, we did not get our project done by another company until January during the coldest, wettest winter on record. They left us with a 3 foot deep, and 3 foot square hole in one of our patios for two months. This was a nightmare. But any cost, any inconvenience was absolutely worth it to sever ties with Forever Awnings and to get and keep these negligent and inconsiderate "workers?" off our property. We consider our sizable loss caused by this company a type of homeowners insurance, worth every penny, to prevent them from causing any more damage which they had proven they would not repair. Every aspect of our dealings with this company and our awning project (thanks to them) was disappointing. So... most definitely we would not recommend Forever Awnings, LLC even to our worst enemies. A 1 star rating is extremely generous.