My husband and I had our Master Bedroom and Bathroom extended, as well as a deck added on to the bedroom. A project that should have taken about 3 months lasted about 5 months.
The first of many problems we had with Mr. Russo was that he did not put a heavy tarp on the addition. Thus, the heavy summer rains caused severe flooding in our bedroom. When we told Mr. Russo about the flood, he just told my husband to pull the carpet back. He never once came over to see how bad our floor was flooded, even after both my husband and I contatced him. Finally, after 3 days, mold was beginning to set in, so my husband and his brother spent hours on their day off removing the wet carpet because our contractor could not be bothered to come remove it himself. Once confronted with the situation, he said all he could do was give me the stairs to the deck as compensation. I felt like he should have done more, and at the very least acted like he cared. He claims the stairs were a $500 job, but those who have seen them balk at that high price.in fact, they ran out of wood nails, and just put in regular nails.
From this point on, I will just list everything that went wrong: Most of his City Inspections failed the first time, he told us when we hired him that he would make sure that his people cleaned up after themselves; however, trash and cigarette butts were left in our yard, cigarette butts and chicken bones were left on our bedroom floor, he broke our sprinkler system after my husband consistently reminded him about it, broke our $100 bird feeder, broke the phone line that he told my husband wouldn't take a "Rocket Scientist" to fix, left us without a stove for 3 days because he did not know how to fix it, we were also without phone, Internet and light in our only working bathroom at the time, did not put the proper padding underneath our new Pergo floor, which made the floor nosiy and too squishy. Once we called him on it, he put a cheaper version of the Pergo padding, and told us how it cost him $900, which it would not have had he done it right in the first place, as a gift built me a bookcase, but then made us pay him $375 for it because we were subtracting fees from our total. The bookshelf is barely worth $75. He procrastinated on ordering our bathroom mirrors for so long that when he finally ordered them, they were out of stock. He told us the shower would be installed the next week, but turns out even though we paid him for it, he still had not even ordered it.
Without our permission, he took some of the tile floor and glued it into an indentation between the new sink and the blue wall. Needless to say, it did not match, and looked awful. As far as I know, he was not a member of the Residential Construction commission, but was legally supposed to be becasue our project was more than $20,000. I only found out about that because the City Inspector told me about it.
To sum up, this guy says he has been in business for thirty years. What kind of business, I can only guess as we dealt with incompetence and shoddy workmanship for the duration of our renovation. Once he got his money, the "nice guy" facade was largely gone and his true colors were exposed. Most disturbing, he uses a religious theme ("Trinity") with his business and on his answering machine. Don't be misled by it, hire someone with a heart and who cares about the quality of work they produce.
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