Savage Home Improvements - Joe Savage This guy is a thief. Do not give any money upfront Morristown New Jersey

I found this company on buildzoom.com. Joe Savage had 5 star reviews. I had him give me an estimate along with other companies for a renovation & addition on my house. I chose his company primarily because of his 5 star rating on Buildzoom.com. What a mistake. I come to find out that most of the people that reviewed him are his friends. The girl on there works at the Home Depot near my house and is a friend. 2 of the other guys that gave him great reviews are friends that he tries to sub out work too.

 Anyway, I give him a 50% deposit. He promises work will be done by the end of Dec. 2014. My town has part time inspectors. He fails the rough plumbing inspection right before Christmas. I now have 5 days to fix the problem & reschedule the inspection before Christmas ( which I can not scedule an inspection until after Jan. 5th.) He pulls his sub contractors to another job & tells me that it will be fixed on Monday for a Tuesday inspection. No one shows up on Monday. Now tells me they will be there Tuesday morning. No one shows up. They show up Wednesday for 1 hour & fix the problem. I now have to wait 3 weeks for a plumbing inspection because someone couldn't take an hour to fix the problem. Meanwhile I could not move forward on the rough inspection & have the drywall crew in. A month wasted. 

Now he has failed 5 inspections so far & says he has never failed an inspection before. He claims my inspectors are rough on contractors. Bull. I told his electrican that they need to install arc fault breaker for electrical. They laughed at me & sure enough they failed. I work in the trade on commercial projects so I have alot of knowledge but gave them the benefit of the doubt since I do commercial & industrial.

 I paid for a generator to be installed and electric trenched & run to my garage. Weather was mild & actually almost 70 degrees. Trenching was to be done on Saturday. Friday tells me that he will pick up the trencher in the morning & do the work Saturday. He does not show up. I call him & he is at his sons basketball game & will bring it after. Does not show up. I call. He tells me he can't work today he has family coming over. Monday temperature drops to 20 degrees. It's now 2 months & tells me it's to cold to do any trenching & does not have the money to give back to me.

 He has taken money for work performed & not paid the subs. I am stuck paying the subs for work I already paid him for. I am renting a house for longer than expected. I also have to pay these guys since tell will walk if I don't. He even had the never to try to get more money from me. I had the subs do some extra work that I agreed on with them. He tried to raise the price & tell me I had to pay him for it. Yeah right. 

If you want a guy that does not know what he is doing, will take your money & take 3 months to finish a job that should take 3 weeks. This is your guy. All he cares about is the 50% up front. 

This guy had 11 reviews on Buildzoom for 8 months. After my bad review, 6 more 5 star reviews pop up. Also, Buildzoom lets contractors dispute a review. They remove the review immediately after the contractor disputes it. I called buildzoom & forced them to put my review back on. I had my wife add another & within 1 hour it was gone. They call the contractor & tell them if a bad review is posted.