I entered into an agreement with Mr. Joe Rivera, President of the company Men@Site to do a total gut renovation on my home in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, N.Y. He is a short stocky Hispanic man with a short hair cut. He drives a Hummer and works with his father who drives a white van with the words Men@Site painted on the sides of the van.
While I was interviewing Mr. Rivera for the job he was very pleasant, on time, and answered my calls and returned my calls within a reasonable amount of time.
All of that changed once I decided to hire Mr. Rivera and handed him a check for the down payment. Work on my home began and remained at a glacial pace, there were times when days went by and not one stitch of work had been done. Mr. Rivera avoided answering my calls and I would not hear from him for up to three or four days at a time. Worse yet, when I went to my home to check the progress of the work I found workers who I could not communicate with because they were only able to communicate in Spanish. I was able through an interpreter to communicate with his electrician; he informed me that he did not possess a license to perform electrical work. Men@site is not licensed with the NYC department Buildings, go to their website and check for yourself. Mr. Rivera also “repaired” the cornice and within the first rains of spring I had to repair it again because rain water was coming into my home and damaging the walls.
Mr. Rivera installed a new roof on my home and within a month of the first warm days of summer I had 25 to 30 bubbles on the roof that had to be repaired by another roofer.
While Mr. Rivera was working on my home there were no more than two or three workers on the site at one time. There were times when the workers showed up intoxicated and there were actual fist fights amongst themselves. The work site was left unclean, with food from lunch left on the floor. This of course attracted rats, mice, and cockroaches, which as you can guess made me extremely unpopular with my neighbors.
I did some investigating on the internet and found out that Mr. Rivera ran his company out of a laundromat by the name of Splishy, Splashy, laundromat, which is located at 183 Smith Street, in Cobble Hill Brooklyn11201. If you put Splishy Splashy laundromat into a search engine (Google.com) you will see that Mr. Rivera had legal problems at that establishment as well. He was evicted from 185 Smith St. And moved his construction/laundromat business to 183 Smith St. I went to 183 Smith Street, in Cobble Hill Brooklyn11201 unannounced, and Mr. Rivera arrived there within an hour and a half.
I confronted Mr. Rivera and told him that I was very unhappy with his work ethic, attitude, workers and the shoddy work; he said to me that “you are beginning to become a pain in the ass and I think that I am going to drop you as a client”.
Mr. Rivera immediately stopped working on my home and I contacted an attorney. What Mr. Rivera did to me was despicable and if you are planning to hire him please do your homework.
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