John T Murray

This is the most unprofessional, untrustworthy, and shady contractor that I've ever met. John Murray (doing business as Home Improvement Inc) should be avoided at all costs. Save yourself money, hassle, frustration, and regret and find someone else.

My family hired Mr. Murray, on the advice of a friend who was doing him a favor, to fix a house that had been purchased after being foreclosed and vacant for 5+ years.

Mr. Murray constantly missed work, saying he would show up a certain day and time and then either didn't show or would consistently be hours late and ended up taking months longer than the estimated completion date. For example, he would say he would be at the house early the next morning and I don't remember him ever showing up to work before 12 PM, even when he stated he would be at the house the next morning. He would then work for a few hours and leave usually by 4-5 PM. We realized he wasn't working nearly as much as he claimed when some family members showed up to look at the house one day when he was supposed to be working and found no one there. His assistant showed up to work more and did more work than Mr. Murray did from what I witnessed. A project that was supposed to be finished by July 2017, wasn't actually finished until sometime between Sept. - Oct. 2017, so my family was put in a bind because they were supposed to move out of their previous residence and move into the new house by Aug. 1st and that didn't happen. Because of this delay, my family eventually had to move into this house that wasn't anywhere near safe or ready to be lived in and it was like that for a few months until he finally finished the job.

He did shoddy workmanship. He overcut all the electrical outlets in the house so we had to buy large size outlet covers and try to patch up the walls ourselves. None of the floors that he put in the house are level so there are gaps between 1/2 inch - 2 inches between certain rooms where the floors meet and causes people to trip constantly. The bathroom that he installed leaked, ruined the drop ceiling below it, and we had to get someone else to fix it. He messed up the cabinets and then wanted us to pay for new ones.

Mr. Murray did things that we didn't approve of without asking us and then complained when we told him what he did wasn't on the contract and we didn't approve what he was doing. We wanted to redo the entire basement and put walls up for separate rooms. Mr. Murray decided to start framing the walls and putting them up without even asking us where they should be placed. A family member got home one night and noticed the basement suddenly had wall framing where it shouldn't be. After some discussion, Mr. Murray did finally move two of the walls but the rooms still weren't set up how we had planned. Another example is when he decided to put a bathtub in the new basement bathroom without asking us. We originally wanted to put a walk in shower instead because it's a small space but he put in the tub before asking us.

Mr. Murray is not someone that my family could trust. We caught him stealing our families' belongings on one occasion. I don't know if it happened more than we know of. Our father had just bought a heavy duty extension cord and it was in the basement. A few days later, someone was looking for it and we asked Mr. Murray if he had seen it since he had been working in the basement where the extension cord was stored. He said he thought it was his and told that person they could get it out of his work truck that was in the driveway. When the person went to the truck, the only extension cord in the work truck was an old and rotted cable, not the brand new one my family had just purchased. We also caught Mr. Murray when he tried to steal the leftover tiles we had purchased for the kitchen because he said he didn't realize we needed them.

Mr. Murray was sloppy and didn't care about our property. We found cigarette butts all over the yard and inside the house reeked of smoke. We found food wrappers and soda bottles outside, near the cigarette butts. He left most of his equipment at the house, which took up a huge chunk of the basement, even though there were young children at the house and we had asked him not to on more than one occasion and it stayed there for the entire 3-4 months it took him to complete the job. The worst part of it all was the house debris/trash that he left out in the driveway and yard for the entire 3-4 months. As he removed stuff from the house, he would just throw the debris out in the driveway, instead of getting a trash dumpster to put it in. We figured he would pick up all that trash as it was just sitting in the driveway, out in the open, but he didn't. We finally started asking him but again, all the house debris didn't get removed until he finished the job so the driveway looked like a garbage disposal site for months.

I have pictures to verify. I want to write more but I'm out of space. AVOID RESCUE HOME IMPROVEMENT!