Jansz Interiors

I hired Stewart, who was a long time friend to reno my basement of our four level home I bought with daughter, I cashed in some retirement savings to do this, to date the work is still not done, the workmanship of the painting and trim is horrible, he made my floors look worse from his machines, they chipped and when he put trim on he buckled a few instead of fixing right, He took almost 8 months and with him giving every excuse on why he did not finish, and asking for more money up front to pay rent etc. I gave to him in good faith (I know now that I was wrong for doing so), he kept giving me every excuse and other dates and times he would come and no showed, he actually blocked me instead of being a man and so called friend, he now will have to deal with a court case I am in the process of building. Lots of witnesses and messages. DO NOT GIVE HIM MONEY UNTIL 100% satisfied.

Actually I completed disagree with the prior commentary as my experience and my mom's has been relatively positive. I have spent 100's of 1000's of dollars on reno's on my house and cottage. And NO, Stewart was not perfect, and there have been a couple of minor follow ups that needed to be addressed over the years (but they were addressed and I was satisfied). Overall, the experience has been fine. I never expected perfection, just reponsivieness and timely follow up, which both myself, and my mom's project received. In fact, my mom's basement looks amazing. My bathrooms, and my own basement was handled swiftly and with the amount of work I wanted to cover off in my budget.

Stewart has helped me finish projects under budget. He's also made suggestions and gotten creative with projects that have looked really great when they are done. When I couldnt' afford the kind fo counter I wanted, he improvised and made it look like it was costly.

I think in dealing with any contractor, and home based reno, you have to manage your own expectations as a homeowner and be realistic that it may not go completely according to plan. I've used atleast 40 - 50 contractors in my 42 years of owning 5 different properties, and I can honestly say that Stewart is by far one of the better ones. Trust me when I say that the worst ones were so horribly, you would probably be in court dealing with the problem.

We hired Stewart recently to finish our basement, and were sadly disappointed with the experience. We realized that we were expecting a better work ethic, and the frustration we felt towards the end of the project really made us regret our decision to go with him. We have a long list of issues that we can share, but a few that pop to mind include extremely shoddy paint work and finishings, incorrect timelines and expectations, blatantly misleading us on quality of flooring (indicated he would purchase as close to the 14mm laminate we have in the rest of our home, but we now find out he used 10mm, which we did NOT want), etc. (We have taken pictures of all issues, and can share as requested.) He finished the work on a Thursday evening after we went to bed, and we did not get to see the finished product at that point; Friday morning, we realized that there was still a substantial amount to be completed. With him already exceeding our final finish date, which was critical due to work from home timelines, we asked him to come back for 1-2 days to finish all of our last-minute items that we were not happy with, or to cut the price for us to hire someone else. He immediately offered a price cut, which indicates his work ethic at this point. It was only after we took a closer look after he left that we noticed all the issues above had not been resolved.
All in all, we do NOT recommend this contractor, and only now do we realize why he did not provide us with references that we could see in person, but could only reach by phone, leading us to wonder who exactly these people were... Lesson learned.