By Design General Contracting

We hired Tony (Anthony [Last name removed --Ed]) who owns By Design General Contracting (also [competitors name removed - ed]) to do a major renovation for us on our 160 Victorian home in Cabbagetown. Tony [Last name removed --Ed] is not equipped to be a general contractor and the trades he claims to be a professional in, masonry and basements, he is not. 6 months after he laid the concrete in our 4,300 sq ft home, we are had to hire a professional basement company to come in and fix major water seepage in our basement. On top of the $240,000 we were essentially ripped off by Tony, we now have to pay another $12,000 to have [competitors name removed - Ed] come fix the water issue.

Tony never kept on schedule with the renovation. He bills arbitrarily and nothing ever sticks to any contract or time deadline. As an example, he called in the roofer to come re-do the new roof for the extension and while that roofer was on-site, he did not bother to have a skylight moved. He claims to be able to read City approved drawings, yet messed up huge on a fire corridor. His reason for the error? He "forgot" about drywall thickness and hence the corridor ended up being inches narrower than it needs to be to pass code.

Please learn from our mistakes. Please do not hire this man. He is a menace to the entire idea of general contracting. He has a side kick named Joe [Last name removed--Ed], who is a real estate agent with Sutton Realty. Joe is a real smooth talker and both of them will make you feel like they know what they are talking about. We fire Tony after he nearly sucked us dry financially. My suspicion is that when we were left with nothing, i.e. financially, Joe [Last name removed -- Ed] comes back into the picture to help us sell our house (at a loss no less).

What a bunch of crooks. It's in cases like this that karma is the only thing we can hope for. Well, that and warning others. Please do not hesitate in contacting me for more information.

A and K