JB & J Concrete Services

First off, I think it’s important to note the workers were going through a personal tragedy. I know this accounted for some of the challenges I’ll be talking about. However, I don’t believe this fully explains the struggles we dealt with (communication and scheduling being the most obvious affected by the personal tragedy). We selected JB and J, because they quoted a lower price compared to other contracting companies. We had coordinated a date for them to come during the work week, but despite several calls on that day and assurances they were still planning to come during those calls, no one came. We ended up rescheduling for a couple days later, but we ran into the same issues. Only in the afternoon did they actually come over and they were only able to stay for about 3 hours. Until this point, frustrating as a consumer, Even with personal struggles, I feel like at least communicating with your consumers is important and they should not be ignored. However, the other concerns we had were about work quality. They come without proper tools, only two shovels In hand, it shows how unprepared and unprofessional they are. They did not tamp down the paver base to produce a solid foundation for the retaining wall. This would lead to the retaining wall sinking in the future and may cause it to buckle and require it to be replaced in a few years. We were building this in front of an existing retaining wall that will soon no longer support weight. They did not provide enough space behind the retaining wall for gravel backfill, which would not allow adequate drainage. After we confronted them with the work quality issues and cutting corners, they did not return our calls and left the project in shambles. It felt they did not have much experience working with retaining wall projects in the past and the quality of work was in line with that assertion. It was also frustrating that we lost several good weeks of great weather while trying to work with them to complete this work. This set our timeline way back and we might now have our wall constructed before the season ends.