Lowenberg, Randy

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• By Alan Kalker K.

  May 13, 2022

  The congenial contractor from hell
  This is the review I wish we’d read before hiring Randy Lowenberg of Crescent Builders as a contractor. You read about contractors like him but hope you never have the misfortune of working with one.
  Randy is a very congenial guy. Easy to get along with and a terrific salesman. When bidding for the job he was fast, organized and persuasive. We never met that version of Randy again. He was the most disorganized, profoundly incompetent person we have ever had the misfortune of working with. It was a costly, aggravating mistake.
  A pictorial review of this project can be seen on Youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6lLYEDyIVc
  Scheduling – The contract we signed required Randy to provide a full building schedule with the names and contact information with planned dates of service for the whole project. We never got it.
  He rarely scheduled anything more that a week or two in advance. That resulted in very long delays. Our 6–8 week project was going for over 25 weeks when he was fired and still had a way to go. He liked to blame things on Covid but that was only a small part of the story. His lack of scheduling organization drove his subcontractors crazy.
  Ordering – He didn’t order things like doors, heaters and deck railing until months into the project, a week or two before he actually needed then blamed the months long delays in their arrival on Covid. Given the well-known Covid related supply chain issues, these supplies should have been ordered as soon as the contract was signed. We would have been happy to pay for the supplies and store them on site if necessary. We were not given that choice.
  Cleanliness – The contract required him to keep the site clean of any unnecessary building debris on a daily basis. But the site was a dangerous pigsty as trash accumulated in large piles for weeks, then months. We were not happy. The neighbors were not happy. His response “It’s a construction site.”
  Work quality – The walls shimmy in and out, doors were hung crooked, caulk looked like a clumsy five-year-old applied it. Window frames were installed crooked in three directions and the windows leak in the winter. A deck he installed with a rickety railing had to be taken down and reinstalled at an extra cost of over $7,100. He forgot to supply electricity to an air conditioner that had to be retrofitted for an additional $2,800 etc. etc. ad nau$eum. See the YouTube video for pictures. At the very least you’ll see the bullet you dodged by not hiring him.
  Subcontracts to himself - Randy earns extra money by hiring himself as a subcontractor on his projects installing windows, outside trim, decking etc. That kept him busy doing his subcontracting work during time that would have been better spent overseeing the other subcontractors, ordering supplies, planning. The kinds of management things we were paying him for. That would have been fine were he a decent carpenter. He isn’t. Randy’s response to each problem when pointed out is that it falls within the minimal building code standards. We wish that we’d known what his standards were from the beginning.
  Billing – Late and as sloppy as his carpentry. The only time he was as fast as with his original estimate was in getting us the bill 48 hours after we fired him. Errors of thousands of dollars were found. Guess in whose favor?
  We have spent months fixing things that he messed up and continue cleaning up his mess now five months since he was fired. It has cost us an additional $12,000 and countless hours so far and we have more to do. When I told one of his subcontractors who I saw recently that we fired him, he silently pumped his fists, smiled broadly and did a little happy dance. I am writing this in the hopes that anyone reading it will not have to go through the same.

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