Second homeowner says contractor did shoddy work and not all of it

CHARLOTTE — A second homeowner says the contractor Action 9 reported on last month, took her money but only did some of the job and that she had to hire someone else to redo a lot of the work.

Kathy Greenwell kept a thick binder on her project.

She says she hired Howie Byrns to remodel her bathroom and paid him more than $27,000. She had a contract, but it didn’t say when the work was supposed to be done.

“He said about six weeks,” Greenwell said. Mid-April 2023 would have been the latest.

“He did remove the existing bathroom. He did put in flooring. He did start the shower. Never finished,” she said. She says she waited until early May 2023.

“He still had to put in shower glass doors. He still needs to do tons of caulking, tons of grout,” she said. “He came up with lots of excuses, very poor work, and when he knew we were unhappy, that’s when he started coming less and less.”

Greenwell says a lot of the work Byrns did was shoddy, like the shower floor didn’t drain, tiles didn’t line up, and the faucet wasn’t straight.

She says she paid another contractor to do most of it over, which cost “about another [$]20,000.”

You may remember Amy Craig who says she hired Byrns and kept a notebook. She also says he did poor work and not all of it. “It’s inexcusable. Absolutely inexcusable.”

Craig says she told law enforcement. Greenwell says she thought about going the civil court route and suing him but hasn’t. At least not yet.

“It has become a real issue,” she said. “My concern is how many elderly people is he going to get?”

No matter who you hire:

- Make sure you have a contract like Greenwell did, but make sure it spells out all the details such as when the work should wrap up.

- Research both the company name and the owner’s name. After all, he or she may change business names to escape bad reviews.

- Pay as little upfront as possible: no more than a third if you can (custom jobs may require more).

- Make sure he or she is a licensed contractor (if the project is over $40,000 in North Carolina, $5,000 in South Carolina).

Click here to check in N.C.

Click here to check in S.C.

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