This guy is good. Good in the sense that he totally snuck by my defense shields. My key mistake in retrospect was accepting a reference list with only email addresses. I have to remember that I need to check references on the phone.
Our saga began in Oct where we responded to a craigslist add, checked references, and sent him a deposit. He claimed to have had a heart attack in Jan and he never got back to us right away. What threw me was that he would contact us telling us the status of things. So we gave this guy the benefit of the doubt. We even offered to come to Manteca and pick up the dollhouse that he allegedly had made already. You see, he claimed that he needed to get a crew together to come out to us. He even scheduled a date with us, but we had to break it.
Anyways, one year later (!) we gave up on him and my wife bought a playhouse on craigslist that was sitting in someone's backyard for $350. I had to rent a truck a go take it apart and reassemble it. But we have a lovely 8x6 playhouse now and are letting the wounds from Kevin Dean Shook heal. Also he goes by Dean Dean
So the learning is two things:
1) Check references over the phonea
2) If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. He was selling a delivered, assembled, painted playhouse for $800 or so. From mousing around the internet I see that a similar deal is about $2500.
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