So-so on heritage tuckpointing
I used Invisible Tuckpointing on my 120-year-old house on recommendation from the city's heritage preservation board. I should have been suspicious when Mario was always available, sending me text messages saying he had time again. He says he used to have year-long backlogs, but no longer. I've since discovered some of the city's heritage architects won't use him because of his reliance on brick patches. He was quick to criticize my neighbour's wall as 'cement' mortar, but after quoting me a 'lime-based mortar' started mixing in good quantities of cement himself. Mario is one of those contractors that believes he is always right, but the whole thing did not look or feel right. The photo shows how the brick patching turned out (not great)... Mario will go to great lengths to explain, in his scholarly way, how everything he does is perfect, but I don't agree and apparently others don't either. Think twice before engaging this company.
- Approximate cost of services:
- $5,000.00
- Company Response
He didn't agree with my proposed method to restore his house.
In his words, he had thought me to be an artisan only to "discover" that I wasn't.
At that point all he wanted to do was to abort the contract. We were a little over the halfway point.
All the preparation work of removing the old mortar had been done by then and what was left was to apply the new mortar. The contention was about what the ingredients that comprised the replacement mortar should have been.
When I provided several documents that substantiated the rationale of my approach, he rejected them all.
It didn't matter that I had remained courteous, that I hadn't asserted my rightness and that I had expressed a willingness to work with him to reach an agreement.
He simply wanted out of the deal. He was completely shut off in terms of exploring any other option.
My word-for-word response at that very moment was: "Fair enough, I will take full responsibility for obviously having failed to properly communicate what I was going to do, and so I'll pack and leave and you owe me nothing".
I don't know about you, but I have never met anyone else in my life who would have said what I have told him.
He didn't reflect this fact in his review at all; instead he gave me a 2 out of 10 and he even made slanderous comments about me to boot.
He did pay me something on his own accord, to his credit; however, I got paid a fraction of what he owed me for the work up to that point, not to mention that I would have had the right to a breach-of-contract settlement should I have insisted on it and pursued it. I took the high road.
It should be noted that the brick patch he refers to wasn't finished. He fails to mention that I had sourced out a reclaimed brick that was close to the original units on his house, but he didn't like it. He told me he was the most picky individual I would ever meet in my life.
The job has since been completed by someone else and, from what I can see from looking at it from the street, it certainly doesn't look better than the result I would have achieved. The part that was left to be performed was the "gravy" portion of the contract; and so he's probably saved himself a chunk of cash in the process.