Tracy Winters Log Homes and Sealants

This is going to be a lengthy, but honest review that I think anyone interested in purchasing a log home package or hiring Tracy Winters might find useful/helpful. I purchased a log home package back in Spring of 2016 from Cracker Style Log Homes. Were recommended that we should have one of his builders build our home because they have the most experience with his packages. Made sense. We asked how long it would take from start to finish and were told under a year, approx. 8-10 months. A few weeks after purchasing the engineered plans and putting a deposit down on the package, I was contacted by a recommended builder from Cracker Style Log Homes, Tracy Winters from Winters Construction. He drove down and met with me on at the site where we wanted to build own home. I received a good first impression from him and I proceeded to sign his contract to get the ball rolling. It took over 3 months to get the building permit approved. Finally, permit was approved and we waited week after week for the breaking ground to begin. Finally in November of 2016, our foundation was completed. I paid Tracy up front in July which was 4 months before foundation/concrete work began. A month after the foundation work had been completed, the concrete company contacted me saying they never received payment. I assured them that I had paid Tracy to pay them. Well Tracy never did nor had the financial ability to. So I had to pay them directly to prevent a lien being put on my property. Tracy said he’d work out paying me back throughout the rest of the build. I only received a $750 credit from the $15k owed. After the foundation was completed, the project was stood still until February 2017. When Tracy and his crew finally came down in beginning of February to start, things went pretty well and we were satisfied with the progress. He had a younger crew with him that were in training which had us a little bit nervous but Tracy was there with them every day supervising. The first flaw we noticed were the dovetail ends weren’t stacking up quite like they should. They weren’t all uniform in length. Some stuck out farther and others are shorter. Also, there were quite a few large spaces between the tails. We were told it was a milling error. Well, by the time is was noticed it was too late to do anything. Lack of supervision on the jobsite was also a huge problem during our build. When Tracy wasn’t on site, errors occurred. We had 2 COSTLY ERRORS that occurred under Tracy's supervision: Metal Roof and Stain on Logs. I asked Tracy over and over again for a revised cost schedule sheet and NEVER received one as he promised. For about a year, I paid Tracy promptly every week (within 2 hours of being billed/invoiced) for 3-4 days worth of work on average of $4-5k and his crew average 3-4 workers each week. The build ended up taking too long and going over budget (mainly due to labor expense). In September of 2017, we were $60k over budget (in labor) from the original cost sheet provided at the beginning of the build. There were some changes/additions, but not $60k worth. In January of 2018 we had no choice but to terminate Tracy from finishing the house. I contacted Cracker Style Log Homes and made them aware, but no one really seemed to care. They did send us the rest of our flooring that came in our package, but didn’t send us our blind inserts for the doors. It was an unpleasant and costly experience to go with a builder recommended by Cracker Style Log Homes. Now Tracy has gone silent and has not reimbursed me for the money he owes me from not paying our foundation/concrete subcontractor.