Concrete Epoxy 101

If I could give Sam and his company Concrete Epoxy 101 less than 0 I would.
I signed a contract in May 2022 for $10,500 to sand and epoxy a 900 sq ft garage, some stairs, and sand and stain some outdoor concrete steps. $10,500 was a hefty price (which I later learned) but I thought if I paid more than usual than he would work harder and do a good job with real professional staff and professional tools that was my expectation. Overall in my opinion the work at my place was in my opinion very shoddy and low quality and caused me a huge amount of new problems.
The work first began with jacking out and sanding my garage floor. The sanding in my opinion was really low quality and sporadic and patchy, they missed a lot of spots and I brought it up the first day. They used a small sander which could be rented at Home Depot, not the heavy duty 600lb professional sander I was expecting. Not only that after each day of sanding they didnt clean up after themselves and left my place extremely dusty particularly on the front steps. I asked Sam to come back and remove the dust and it took him 2 days to get one of his staff to come back and vacuum it up. Not only that after he left there was still a substantial amount of dust still on the steps and the dust ended up staining the concrete.
Sam was supposed to level the garage with the correct concrete in my opinion his leveling caused so many bumps and unlevel spots I dont even know where to start. Also on the first cast of the leveling cement a large amount of liquid concrete escaped Sams control during the spreading and spread onto my original asphalt driveway. All the cement that spilt onto my driveway bonded very firmly to my ashphalt. When I immediately brought this up with Sam he said no problem and said he would remove it with pressure washing. When that didnt work they used a Jackhammer to remove it which deeply damaged my ashphalt driveway and Sam said he would replace my damaged asphalt driveway so I let them proceed. So they jacked out large portions of my driveway. During this jacking process Sam also severely damaged the lip of my garage. Sam said he would also fix it and I believed him. They also mixed the leveling cement directly on my driveway without plastic and there are permanent cement stains in 3 locations which cant be removed by pressure washing.
After that Sam applied the first coat of epoxy. The first coat of epoxy in my opinion was so bubbly and rough and uneven and patchy I was really concerned about the quality of the final product and told Sam about it several times. The stairs to the basement where he applied epoxy was extra bubbly, uneven and patchy.
After that I decided to consult with a friend about the work to date and what the remedies should be since not only was the work to date in my opinion very poor quality and I didnt have any confidence in his ability, but there was significant additional damage to my driveway and driveway lip and stains on the driveway that needed to be accounted for. I mentioned to Sam the work has been absolutely unsatisfactory to date and I will need to take some time to decide what to do. After about a month and a half I asked Sam for a partial refund of funds and I would find a new contractor to finish the job. Sam texted me several times and said everyone makes mistakes and said he would fix it all so against my better judgement I actually gave him another chance a month later to come finish the garage and fix my driveway and garage lip which he severely damaged. Sam came back, the last week July 2022, and brought someone in to try to straighten out the garage lip he damaged. Sam meanwhile started working on the front porch and did such a unsatisfactory job staining it with streaks and lines everywhere I asked him to fix it.
The next day Sam said he quit the job and was walking away from the job because of personal and staff reasons, despite me paying him over $6250 so far, and having substantial damage to my garage lip and ashphalt driveway and in my opinion poorly half done epoxy to my floor and stairs.
In my opinion at my house Sam did extremely poor quality work, damaged my driveway even more, and in my opinion he literally just took off when he realized the work and funds needed to repair the numerous damages he caused would far exceed his fees.
I ended up hiring a totally different Epoxy contractor who removed all of Sams work including all the leveling concrete he put down and this time he used a $20,000 - 600lb grinder. It took over a week of sanding and overall it cost 2x the amount I paid Sam to remove all his defective work and re-epoxy the garage. They ended up sanding all of the garage again to the original concrete and also jacking out particularly thick areas of leveling cement overall some 1500 lbs of leveling concrete was removed. When they jacked up the concrete Sam poured it came up in plate size pieces which means it hadnt bonded to the substrate properly due to inadequate sanding and cleaning of the original substrate. Also turns out the cement he used was likely not suitable for parking garages too so it would have likely failed in any event as per my new contractor. Likely I believe the floor would have broken up after a few times driving a car ontop. That fee doesnt include fixing the basement stairs , front steps, repairing the damage to my ashphalt driveway, just the garage floor.. Overall I expect the final damages to be in the $25,000 to $30,000 range, much much more than I could have imagined.
What a horrible and expensive experience this has been for me and my family. Thankfully we have photos, text messages, video evidence and witnesses of this whole fiasco and will decide what to do next. I encourage anyone who has had similar experiences with this individual to take him to court. Do your research folks before you hire someone!