We had Bruce Clark & Son in to do a tear apart and redo of the bathroom in our newly purchased home in 2007. We had to ask the bank for extra cash attached to the mortgage in order to be able to do so. Jamie, a son of Bruce's I'm assuming, did an decent job on the rough plumbing requests we had. (ie. move the toilet across the room). This is where our satisfaction ceased.
If they haven't done so already, I'm hoping that they soon stop billing themselves as renovators. They do plumbing. That's it.
Where to start?:
1. Jamie gouged us. Plain and simple - he took advantage of our naivete and took more money from us than he should have - in one instance charging us $1000 (ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS!) to remove and dispose of the old claw-foot tub.
2. They chipped our $3000 Maax bathtub when they temporarily placed the toilet in it. They admitted as much and offered to repair it, but that never happened.
3. The very expensive wainscoting kits that I bought were poorly installed. When I say poorly, I mean "brutally". Corners were not properly finished off or were mal-aligned. Cosmetic finishes installed backwards etc.
4. They made a decision to NOT move a wall 6 inches to allow for the tub. Huge mistake. With brute force, they wedged said 5' tub into a 4'8" opening. Sounds unbelievable right? No joke. It looks as if the wall is eating the back end of our tub.
5. They didn't add an access panel in the wall as mandated by law for all power-tubs. The inspector in charge of certifying our home for the bank's mortgage insurance came "this close" to failing us based on the mistake. In no uncertain terms, we almost lost our mortgage because of Jamie's team's inexperience. It literally almost cost us our home.
6. The crew would disappear for weeks/months without explanation. My wife and I would often baffle at how the house across the street was built from the foundation-up faster than it took for Jamie and team to reno a bathroom. (over five months).
7. They admitted to losing the cosmetic Porcher "nipple" that goes in the tap handle, then failed to replace it. Small thing but the fixture, as a result, looks ridiculous.
8. We recently had to have a plumber in to fix a water pressure issue we were having. When he opened the very expensive (AquaBrass™) fixture, he was aghast to discover that Jamie's team had soldered parts of the mechanism in place. Apparently this particular AquaBrass™ model doesn't need soldering. In fact, soldering basically ruins it - making future adjustments impossible. All of this on top of the fact that we didn't even want the AquaBrass fixture. I have emails specifically requesting that we put in matching Porcher™ fixtures. We should have been more vocal when we saw this sort of FAIL but we weren't living there and didn't know that he'd done this. Sigh.
I could literally go on for pages and pages but don't have the time or the heart to re-live the horrors of our unfortunate run-in with Bruce Clark and Sons Plumbing. It cost us more than we could bear over five months, and what we have at the end of it all is a shoddily assembled mass of very expensive fixtures and tiles.
To add insult to injury, I gave Jamie a fair, but unflattering review online later that year. He badgered me and bullied me, imploring me to take it down. I did not. Nor will I remove this fair and unflattering review of his horrible services rendered.
- Approximate cost of services:
- $30,000.00
- What could this company do to improve their services?
- Stop selling themselves as Renovators and stick to plumbing.
- Any advice to offer fellow homeowners facing a similar project?
- Sue for damages before the statute of limitations runs out. We intend to.