DBT in Newmarket

After purchasing a resale home in Newmarket we were anxious to have our "new" home painted to our tastes. We are delighted to be able to say that having found Manny's Pro Painting on HomeStars he and his crew (Avi and Carlos) fully lived up to their high ratings! Having dealt with more than a few home contractors over the years there are only one or two we would recommend as highly as Manny's Pro Painting. From estimate to final clean-up everything was handled in a professional, friendly and fair manner. The attention to detail, skill and experience of Manny and his guys is clear from the results: a great looking "new" home for us! We will not hesitate to recommend and use Manny ourselves again!

Time to re-seal an asphalt driveway and no time for DIY. Found this company via Homestars.com and decided to try them dispite the small number of reviews. They repsonded quickly and efficiently to our initial phone call. An amount was agreed and a time scheduled. The scheduled time came and went. No calls and no workers. Called to find out the problem. No return call. Several hours later and in the middle of our dinner, the crew showed up. They were very sorry but another job caused a delay that backed up their whole day. Once on site they were quick and efficient. Driveway looks almost like new a week after re-sealing, even with a week of heavy rain on and off. No serious overspray. Everything looks great to date. Would use them again.

Dominion Roofing is a long established company which, to our knowledge, had a good reputation for quality and workmanship. Unfortunately, first appearances can be misleading. We elected to have Dominion Roofing re-shingle our home and replace all our eves troughs because we THOUGHT we were dealing with an established well known company. We found out after the fact, they sub-contract a lot of work, especially when dealing with existing home situations. The roofing sub-contractor was not properly instructed to do shingles on an end wall. He had to come back. The installation in the end was acceptable, but definately not top of the line. The eves trough on one side of the house was not properly sloped and water pooled in the eves. The eves were not properly caulked at one section such that you would see day light shining through when standing on the ground. A number of the eves brackets were not screwed into anything and just slide around in the eves. After some telephone tag and some pointed discussion, the eves situations were corrected. After the corrective actions were taken I still had to re-do the down spout myself because they didn't bother to properly adjust the downspout after correction for the slope problem. In the end, had we known what we know now we would NOT have knowingly paid the premium to hire Dominion Roofing. We feel we recieved no better an installation or service then we would have recieved from a number of other less well known companies. In fact we likely talked to a least one or two people who are also sub-contractors for Dominion Roof and who were quoting lower pricing to us directly. Lesson for this project: If you are paying a premium price make sure you are not paying a middle man just to go and find a sub-contractor you could have hired yourself more economically.

After having contractors quoting plain jane single car wood frame garages from $15,000 and up we found Duro-Shed in our old Home Show file of pamphlets. You can not beat the value for this product. Supplied and installed and including all the owner supplied items (paint, concrete pad, electrical hook-ups) we saved at least 30% off the lowest contractor quote. Installation was fast and efficient. Product (manufactured panels) is still looking great 4 years later. Read the product literature regarding caulking and painting.

Sometimes the seemingly simple things are best left to the pros. Demolition and removal of a falling down garage is one of them and Goodbye Garage is the company for this! Fast and efficient, they demolished and removed a 'rotten to the core' wood frame garage and the asphault floor in less than 2 days. No mess left, no fuss and no homeowner (namely me) risking life and limb to demolish an unstable structure. Performed exactly as promised and agreed. As an added bonus, the name says it all! Goodbye Garage!

The only reason this contractor does not get a '10' in my books is because they have relocated to BC and are thus not available in the local Toronto, Ontario market any longer. Performed at or above expectations. Worked rain or shine from start of project to completion. When issues arose, they provided alternatives and solutions that were creative and in keeping with the intent of the design. Honest, upfront and delivered excellent value for the money. Currently operating as Green Earth Landscapes in Victoria, BC.

Learned many lessons (some again) hiring Student Works Painting. First: all areas are franchised out to students. In other words, the student 'owns' the company. There is no real recourse to anyone of any authority above the student/painter with whom you signed the agreement. The "head office/company" basically consists of an answering service. Second: if you expect to get what you pay for here, forget it. Crews are trained NOT TO PAINT areas where the home owner will likely not look. We had allowed a "training" crew to come to our home to do preliminary work and overheard some of the so called "coaching" going on. As much time was spent teaching the crew how to avoid work as was spent on how to actually do any painting. Not that you should expect a professional level of job from students in the first place. They are students, afterall. Third: if you have to hound a contractor to get them to START the work, you'd be better off cancelling the contract and finding another contractor. Chances are if they won't start they are NEVER going to finish. Being fairly reasonable and understanding we were basically hiring untrained students we were very careful to give the "owner" explicit and written instructions and areas of concern after the crew finally put in a full days work. Even included hard copy of digital pics so that there would be no mis-understanding. We hoped this would drive home the point that we were watching and would not accept some slap-dash job. No luck. Results: incomplete paint job with serious lack of prep work (cleaning, scraping, sanding, patching). NO PAINT wherever the crew throught we would not look or be unable to see (fortunately for us they were not even smart enough to look carefully themselves as unpainted areas are visible from the ground if you know where to stand). Damaged areas from ladders used without bumpers/guards; paint on eves troughs and left to dry; paint spilled on shingles and attempted to clean with (according to the lead hand of the crew)nail polish remover (it was latex paint...why not water????); paint stains from brushes left on landscape boulders to dry; damaged flat roof which resulting in a leak above the front porch and numerous minor issues like lunch garbage left on the property, failure to clean up at the end of the day, ladders left blocking the driveway etc. Calls to 'Head Office' were worse than useless. An "Area Manager" was finally sent to review the site. He too was an independant franchisee/owner. At no time were we able to actually contact anyone more senior than wet-behind-the-ears 1st year college student. Dispite being physically shown the numerous deficiencies neither "owner" saw any cause for serious concern and could not understand why I was prepared to take them to small claims court. Give them one more chance says the wife. We provide a list of at least a half dozen major items and some more minor items for attention before we will even REVEIW the job for POTENTIAL payment. Lesson Four: Know when to say enough is ENOUGH! One more chance results: "owner" calls up on a lovely sunny summer Sunday afternoon while we are enjoying the backyard with company: "I'm coming over to complete the job." Me: "Oh? When?" owner: "In an hour." Me (against my better judgement): "Ok. We have company but we'll be in the back of the yard. How many guys are coming?" owner: "Just me." Needless to say this is going no where fast. The "owner" shows up. No ladders. Asks to borrow my ladder. Ok. The "owner" goes off for an hour to do a little of the work and a lot of cell phone talking and returns to ask to speak with the wife (I have made it clear I do NOT think they deserve "another chance"). Now WE must agree to full payment if x, y and z is completed and WE must sign this piece of paper (without letterhead or any other identifying information) stating such, immediately. I respond that WE will not even discuss this today, WE have company and that if you are not willing to keep working under those conditions you should go home right now. We MAY discuss this on monday. Needless to say the "owner" left, spewing, sputtering and swearing, never to be heard from again. Lesson six: Small claims court is probably NOT going to be a recourse for many (most?) people. It takes a significant amount of time and energy just to file a case let alone the time and energy necessary to go to the court, present the case and have a judgement rendered. And you will have a hard time filing a case if you have not got proper mailing addresses, names, company names etc etc. You can not file a case if all you know is a cell phone number and some generic answering service phone number. Even if you WIN, you still have to go out and collect the money. Read that again: YOU have to go out and collect the money. The court does not do it for you.