Complaint Review: American Exteriors

WATCH OUT IN WARREN!!! Edward Morefield American Exteriors and the City of Warren Police Department

This guy / one man company represented himself as an insured experienced roofer.  he had the lowest price to do a tear off and reroof a home and over the phone sounded like a typical roofer / contractor. 

     I gave this guy $2,000 dollars cash up front to buy all materials and get the job started on a Thursday evening.  He said he would start the very next day on Friday.  Well, Friday came and went... no show, no materials.  Then saturday he did pick up about 1/3rd of the shingles needed to do the roof.  But he was too cheep to pay $35 dollars for delivery and thought that humping 60 plus 75 pound bundles up a ladder two stories was a better option.  This was my first red flag.  Sunday came and he tore off the old roof. 

     Next red flag was that he included 30 pound felt paper on his quote.  When i showed up, he had purchased the thinner and lower quality 15 pound felt paper telling me that it's the same stuff and actually even better.  It isn't better and it's not the same stuff. 

     Another red flag came in when he asked me for more money to buy supplies.  When i asked him where the $2,000 went that i gave him he told me that his truck broke down and it had to get fixed.  Then his nail gun broke and he had to buy a new one.  So basically he used my money that i gave him for all the supplies to fix his truck, buy a new nail gun, and buy some supplies.

     During one of my conversations i had in asking him when he was coming back to the home, i asked him if he had any insurance (as his card implied).  he told me he didn't and that it got too expensive, so he let it go.  So he was not insured as all of his craigs list ads and his business cards say. 

     Then the next string of red flags came in when day after day there was no progress on the home.  I would call him asking when he would get on the job and he said in a couple of hours, and he still didn't show up and work.  Finally he did show up one day and got about 10% of the roof shingled.  After that he didn't show up again until 5 days later when he realized that i hired another roofing company to finish his work. 

     He was furious!!!  he told me that he had a contract, that he now fell off the roof and hurt his elbow and that he is now going to sue me!  his own contract said that work would be completed as of 3 days from the time i gave him the deposit to start.  it was now 11 days since i had given him the cash.  During this time it had rained substantially on my house that had no shingles on it and was not tarped off poperly.  The first rain there was no tarp on the unshingled roof at all, and the second time there were tarps on about 40% of the roof, so 60% got wet and didn't have shingles on it. 

     After doing some resaerch, i found out that this guy had recently been arrested for probation violation, flast pretenses, stalking, and had been in and out of the Macomb County Court system for the better part of his adult life. 

     Here comes the good part.  Upon Ed the old roofiing contractor finally figurinng out that i had to hire someone esle to clean up his mess (oh and they had to redo what little shingles he did get up on the roof becasue it was not nailed properly) he showed up at the job site, and stold materials right infront of the other roofing crew!  The police were called and even though it was witnessed by 3 other people in broad daylight, the police did nothing about it becasue Ed had the receipt to the origional shingle purchase that i gave him the money to buy the materials in the first place.  So basically the police said that becasue he had a receipt that they were unable to determine if it was my cash used for the purchase or his cash used for the purchase.  They told me to persue it in a cival court and that steeling materials that i paid for from a jobsite was not a criminal matter.  Thank you City of Warren Police Department and District Attorny!!!  Great Job putting the criminals away!  I was also told by Officer Pitaszek that even if he did get proscuted that they would just work out a probation deal and that breaking his previous probation deal is not a big enough deal to do anything anyways.  Beside this i was told that there is just not enough room in Macomb County Jail for all these guys and they reserve jail space for more serious offenses. 

     Now it gets better.  he had left a van and a trailer on my property all this time and the trailer was filled with the old roofing materials from the roof tear off.  Some guy whom i never met shows up and asks me to pay him $80 bucks to take it away becasue Ed who hired him couldn't pay him.  when i told him no, he tried to bargin me down to paying him $50, then even $20.  I basically almost lost my mind and told this guy to get his vehicle and trailer off the property. 

     Here's the finally, Ed calls me up and tells me that if i don't pay him $250 that he is going to bring the trailer with all the roofing materials back to the job site and dump them in my driveway! 

This guy is human garbage, please let my story save you time, money, grief, property damage and above all you and your familys exposure to a criminal.  By the way, the Warren Michigan Police department is useless.