I first contacted Eric in July. I should've known what a loser he was when he never showed up for our first meeting, but I gave him the benefit of the doubt and I rescheduled for later that week. When we did finally get together, I talked with him about my ideas for some custom woodwork and lighting. He gave me an estimate and told me that he would not be available to begin for a few weeks and that the whole job should only take about 2 or 3 days. He wrote up an estimate, I accepted, signed a contract and paid a deposit.
About a month later, he came by to begin the project. He retook some measurements that he had taken at our first meeting and left. (This was his typical pattern. He would come by, work for an hour or so then tell me he didn't have some tool or he needed and that he had to go to Home Depot. He would then disappear for a couple of days.) We played phone tag for a while. About a week later he showed up with the mantel and custom cabinets we had hired him to build. The cabinets did not fit and he didn't have all of the parts for the mantle and fireplace surround. I was unhappy with the cabinets and told him that they would not work. He offered to rework them for me, agreeing to install one in another room as a storage cabinet and to put feet and a few other decorative pieces on the other to turn it into a furniture piece that I could then resell the recoup some of the $ we had spent on it.
It is now May (10 Months Later), and one of those cabinet currently sits unfinished in my shed — no doors, no shelves, no nothing. The other cabinet was bolted into the wall of my recroom. Like the one in the shed, it also has no doors. When his assistant installed the cabinet in the recroom he cut out part of our baseboard. He over cut and left us with several inches of wall with no baseboard. We showed Eric the problem, he agreed to fix it. Surprise, surprise, he didn't. He also never finished caulking the mantle in the livingroom, despite assuring us that it was a quick fix.
We also had Eric replace our frontdoor and explained that although we didn't want him to reinstall it, we wanted to keep our existing storm door. It appeared that he understood. He took care of ordering the new door and installed it when it came in. However, he never replaced the shoe moulding he removed during the installation and TOOK the storm door with him when he left that afternoon. The door was less than a year old and had cost $300 new. It was worth over $100 used and we had planned on selling it. We called him and asked him to return the door, reminding him that we had asked him to leave it with us. We have never seen Eric or our door again. When we last contacted him about coming by and completing the job he told us that he wouldn't be able to come over because he was on a job and had a deadline to meet... Three months after I hired him to do a job that he told me would take 3 days, he tells me that he can't come by because he has a deadline on another gig! Unbelievable. At this point, we gave up.
We had many confrontations with Eric during the time he was "working" for us, even threatening him with a small claims suit. Unfortunately, we made the mistake of paying him in full before the job was done and have paid some serious stupid tax as a result. Bottom line: Beware Eric Park! He is a sloppy, lazy, disrespectful, dishonest and undependable bum. He's not a real impressive carpenter either... in the end, we ended up paying him for subpar work, not to mention work he never even did. We will also have to pay a PROFESSIONAL carpenter to fix all of the issues he left behind. Immediately after dealing with him, we really wanted to trash him, but realized quickly that he didn't need us to ruin his business — he was going to do a bang up job of that on his own.
I dare Eric to post a rebuttal to this report. We have copies of our original paperwork, as well as bank records and pictures of his "work" to back up every word of it. Save yourself a lot of unneccesary trouble and steer clear of Retrimit or any other scam business this bum is running. The Nashville area has too many good carpenters available to waste your time and hard earned money with a phony like Eric Park.
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