Complaint Review: Peter Johannesen - Dallas Texas

Back in June/July 2011 we began getting bids for our kitchen renovation and met with about 5 different contractors. We ended up choosing Peter Johannesen of Johannesen Construction at the time because he seemed very knowledgeable and was the most interested in working with us, not because he was the cheapest. We did a background search on Peter Johannesen and nothing came up to raise any concerns.  We didn't see any red flags and based on his positive reviews on sites such as Best Contractors and Insiderpages.com, etc., we ended up going with him.

On July 27th we wrote a check to Peter Johannesen for 50% of the contract value minus the appliances which came to $13,000. The total value of the contract was for $26,000. I need to mention we added pulling up the carpeting in the living room floor to replace it with tile or wood that was included in the estimate. Three full weeks went by before Peter hired a subcontractor to start on the living room floor, around or about 8/22/2011.  During those weeks we stayed in contact with Peter. He had originally given us a quote for the living room for $2600, which he said would be for everything in regards to the living room flooring.

On 8/22/2011 when the subcontractor started Peter came over and then stated that the living room floor would now be an additional $500, if we wanted quarter round. This was the first of many red flags. We started to get concerned when Peter started to add a multitude of charges for items that we had wanted prior to signing the contract.
 
At this point we started talking about picking out the flooring for the kitchen and restated we were still interested in putting travertine down as this had not changed from day 1 of the initial meeting. Peter then changed his tune in an email that he only budgeted .50 to 1.50/sq. ft. and travertine would cost an additional $650. This was when our second red flag came up. From receiving his email on 8/25/11, it had been three weeks since we last had any contact from Peter.  I sent Peter an email with all our concerns on September 15th, which we received no response to. By the 6th day of not hearing back, I called him and left him a voice mail demanding he call me back within 24 hours. We still had not heard or gotten a response. By week three of not getting any communication from Peter we went back to doing more research on him and started finding a lot of negative and alarming reviews. We went back to his reviews on insiderpages.com and found posts in late August and early September with negative feedback similar to what we were experiencing. 

At this point I felt I was clearly being made a fool of and Peter had no intention of renovating our kitchen and/or completing the job as we were just another victim in his long list of victims. I informed him that he broke the contract by leaving the site with zero contact for 27 days.  I then stated that if I left my job for 27 days and had zero communication with my employer I would be fired. I restated he was fired and I wanted my money back as our floor in our living room was not complete and our kitchen looks exactly the same it did when I wrote him the first check.  I felt he breached the contract because we were not getting the services that I felt had been described to us.
 
Now that he had been caught in his deception, Peter kept restating in emails that he didn't run away with our money and wanted to complete the job but after I read the other negative reviews and found his previous company, Johannesen Enterprises, thru the Better Business Bureau we wanted to get as far away from Peter as we could. Peter was using the excuse that a death in the family and he was out of the country was the reason for his lack of communication but we knew otherwise. 
 
When we met with Peter he said this was a family owned business that they have been operating for 30 years but we could not find anything to support that claim. In fact, we could only find history on Peter doing construction going back to 2009 so we felt we have been deceived into signing a contract with him.

Had we known the truth we would have never signed a contract with him.
He now has a new company name, Five Star Construction. On his site he has all the same information as before when he was Johannesen Construction, just changed the company name. We found that all his testimonials on his site are fake, not a single one comes from an actual customer. We were surprised to read all the positive testimonials on his site, so we decided to look the customer names. We were surprised and shocked to see that the names were being used by many companies as their own, but in fact they were supplied as website template. Same goes for other areas within his site, passing it off as his own work, but yet again it was part of the template. Examples are all the names in the testimonials and projects and pictures that were not his. He has gone and taken down his previous website with Johannesen Construction, which leads me to believe he is trying to clean up/erase his previous companies identity which again is deceptive to new customers.  Now this is his 3rd company that we are aware of and who knows how many others there are. It seems every time the negative reviews start to accumulate he just creates a new business name and adds his own awesome reviews how great he is and that company is so that consumers like me can continue to be fooled.