RM Home Improvement General & Contracting or Renold McDonald 203K HUD contractor non reliable South Orange New Jersey

Mr. Reynold McDonald from RM Home Improvement’s quality of work is very poor. Beware of using this guy because he will cause damage to your property. Our options are very limited at that time because we have a 203K HUD construction loan. He was recommended by our HUD consultant (which turned out to screw us too – His name is Paul Gorrell from Block’s consulting. I did a separate review for him) and we were given a deadline to select a contractor otherwise we won’t be able to close on our house.  The HUD consultant has all Mr. McDonald’s paperwork ready hence we ended up using him because we did not want to miss our closing date.

He was not my first choice because

1. When he first visited our house  to give us an estimate, he never look at the house to inform me on what needs to be done, he was looking at scraps and looking for stuff he can take home and keep for himself like empty cabinets, etc.  Paul Gorrell, the HUD consultant end up providing us an estimate and Mr. McDonald just agreed to it without even looking at the specification.
2. During the day that he was supposed to start working, he never showed up. We called him and he said he is still waiting for the permit which is understandable. However, he lied because he never filled the permit with the town. I knew because I called the town.

HIS COMMUNICATION SKILLS IS VERY BAD

1. I ordered him to give me a timeline and tell me the weekly plan on what he needs to do and he said he would provide me the plan but he never did.
2. He does what he wants with the house and he does not listen to what the customer wants. Before we got him on board, it was clear what he needs to do because it was written in the contract but he does not like to follow it. Example, we informed him that we do not want gold fixtures but he still bought it and installed it.
3. We tried to help him by providing him pictures, description of what we want exactly for our bathroom, we gave him the pricelist, links, Lowes product number  (the tiles, fixtures, accents, etc) so we won’t messed it up but he ended up still not following our instruction and did what he wants
4. He would also use wood materials that are not heavy duty just to save money even though we have a budget for it (I have a feeling he pocketed the materials budget) which eventually will damage the house during strong winds.  Uses drywall screws for wood foundation.
5. He never order a town inspection so he can hide beam he used that cannot support the house
6. He reported a 95K job to the town when he filed a permit as a 12K job.
7. We asked him to show us an accounting if there is money left for the materials so we can use it for something else but he never showed us anything.

Those are just examples. There are more.

Working with him is such a headache but we gave him a chance, we gave him a list of things he needs to remediate due to the damage that he has done and told him he has 5 days to show effort otherwise we will terminate him. Within those 5 days, he continue to  show that he cannot do the job. He did not show up to work  for couple of days and he started doing other things  the next day that we did not want him to do.  He continues to do more damaged by painting the house without a primer, continue using the wrong materials. We ended up terminating him and we are glad we did but THE DAMAGE HAS BEEN DONE AND WE NEED TO HIRE ANOTHER CONTRACTOR TO FIX THE DAMAGES HE HAS CAUSED.

In short, he is not trustworthy, the quality of his work is very poor, he doesn’t listen to what the client wants and he will just randomly do what he wants.  His contract offers 1 year warranty and obviously we will not use it because we don’t want him to do more damage.