Horrible experience!
Started off good with great contact and follow through.. Miguel disassembled my existing wooden deck, and then I was told that the base was rotten and that the platform would need to be removed and replaced before the composite deck boards could be installed. I was in agreement and this was done while we waited for the new composite boards, which had to be special ordered.
About 2 weeks later the boards were laid while I was out of town, when I returned I started noticing huge gaps, irregularities in the attachments- clips , wobbling when I walked over them, and really rough saw edges. I was assured that I shouldnt worry because things werent finished. Then I became extremely concerned once my stairs were built! They literally looked like a child had built them! After calling the deck distributor and sending him pictures, I was told that this definitely was Not how they should look and that Miguel didn t even use the correct materials for them.. He used the same deck board rather than stair boards that have smooth rounded corners, not jagged boards which had no finished edge. I was also told that yes, my stairs should be able to be made to fan out wider on the bottom, just like my original ones although Miguel told me that it was not possible, and that is why they look the way they did which made no sense to me!
Only when I asked another contractor to take a look at all this did Miguel say that he could do them correctly although my question to him was, Why weren t they done correctly in the first place!?
Around this time my railings arrived and were partially installed, they were cut very unevenly and had large unfinished and rough areas were the cuts were made, apparently with the wrong saw( I discovered by 3 other contractors, with one rail even installed upside down! ) Miguel s answer with regards to the railing was that he could try to fix it although my response was that I would prefer them be replaced, Knowing that they could never fill in the gaps even if they could somehow file down the edges to make them look, smooth!
I could go on and on, but after asking Miguel for invoices to see how much of my money had been spent (of the $10,000 I gave him,) all Miguel could say it was that he couldn t find them! Since this did not sound ethical to me, I then had to go online and track them down, speaking to Lowe s and Home Depot s corporate offices along with the Decking distributor. During this time, Miguel randomly sends me a text one morning saying that he s sorry that he has to take a leave of absence for two months and that he ll refund me less than half of the money that I gave him, stating that he needed the rest for his expenses!,. After days of texting, I finally came to a decision that Miguel could take all the railing back to try to get refunds while returning $6000 to me. Quite honestly, I should ve gotten more than this back, but it gets the point where the summer s half over, my backyard looks a mess with debris,, my stress level has been exacerbated And all I wanted to do was put an end to the bleeding sort of speak .
Now I m in the process of working with a new contractor who knew from the beginning all the things that were done wrong and which are being demoed , replaced and done correctly. Starting from scratch is costing me more than $16,000 additional in labor, materials, etc. has really hurt me financially. That is why in all consciousness I cannot recommend Miguel for anything extensive like rebuilding a deck! Maybe he s able to fix little things, but I would ve really appreciated it if he would just have told me from the beginning or even after he started that this was beyond his knowledge and skill set! But since that wasn t done, one star is all that I can give him in good conscience.