Wednesday, September 25, 2018, Bruce Jordan showed up at 11 AM for his first day as a framing subcontractor at a residential construction site. On Friday, September 28, 2018, Bruce Jordan was ready to leave for the day at 3:30 PM, demanded $3,600 and was fired.
In those two and one-half days, Bruce Jordan and his “team” were on-site doing actual work for 15 hours and a total of 52 man-hours, excluding lunches and breaks. Each day Bruce showed up at a different time with different [one day only] crew members and left at a different time. Nothing was consistent- including breaks, lunches, and especially production.
Bruce Jordan is a framing contractor operating Jordan’s Designs out of McKinney, Texas. He does have a very long history throughout North Texas and the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex in the residential construction industry as he is the son of Metrotex Framing’s founder, growing up and into framing construction.
I was excited to get Bruce on-site and making progress on the cornice assembly as this specific scope of the project had been plagued by material and rain delays. Scaffolding had been erected and ready to go for two months before that Wednesday. It had been almost exactly three months prior that he had quote the work to which I agreed.
The scope was simple and straight forward- finish the cornice and cantilever soffit assemblies, labor only. The fascia had been completed, but the soffits were all open with no blocking, ledger or frieze. Now, this is a 4,000-SF two-story home and the upper cornice was a compound soffit design on 3 planes at two different angles… with some rafter-to-soffit cuts uneven and out of level. Bruce proposed it would take 1 to 1-1/2 weeks at $3,500 per week.
I accepted. I paid Bruce $500 on Thursday, September 29th, upon a random end-of-day request. I then paid him $1,500 when he was fired the very next day… which is today… as I write this.
I fired Bruce after he demanded what amounted to $4100 for two and one-half days on the job. He claimed the job would now cost at “least $8,500 and take more than 3 weeks”. Why? He claimed the required frieze backing and air dam blocks were “extra”.
During and after firing Bruce (before he drove away with the additional $1000 I gave him), he threatened to “report me to the city” and “the Better Business Bureau”, and to ruin my reputation “with lumber dealers”, “online”, “on Facebook”, with “every sub in town”, “however [I] get [my] business”. He threatened “to put me out of business”. Bruce of course also threatened to “put a lien on my house and sue me”.
None of this achieve his desired response- 2,100 dollars more for absolutely nothing. That’s when Bruce became unhinged, even psychotic, and crossed a line from which he will not be returning. He threatened “to breakout my truck windows”, to “pay some real crackheads because [he] knows real crackheads to come over and tear up my house, to rip up everything, to shoot it up!”
Not thirty minutes after he drove away with the three workers he brought, I looked down the street to see one of the three, Steve, walking back to the house. Steve then tells me how Bruce just pulled into a Texaco down the road, told everyone to “get out because he was paying them right [there]” and then “burned rubber speeding away, giving them all the finger out the window”!
I fired Bruce Jordan 5 hours ago. He has called 29 times harassing and attempting to intimidate me further. He has text me over 250 times threatening me, my livelihood and my property through extortion, blackmail and all out criminal destruction. I have filed a police report, but I take this very seriously and don’t believe he is going to magically become a rational, fair-minded person anytime soon.
Please learn from my experience and do not make the same mistake trusting Bruce Jordan. He is at minimum an incompetent fraud, but at most a psychotic menace.