Sir Y.
09/10/2012 12:00:00 SA
It took me a long while to figure out if Oscar deserves a three or four star review. I settled on four stars, because he does good work at a reasonable price. But it could easily have been a three (or lower--read more on that below).
Finding the right handyman, I think, is never easy no matter where you live. Finding one who is responsive, on-time, priced well, and does a good job is practicable impossible. When it was clear we set a definitive time to meet (more on this later), Oscar was on-time. That happened a couple of times--once to get him an understanding of the tasks; the other to do the actual work. His price was $45 per hour for labor; the parts that were needed were ones we agreed on before the work was done and he provided a receipt. Given my investigation around these parts, that hourly fee for someone skilled in a few key areas is OK. The repair work looks very good, and I have no problems with the quality and cleanliness. Indeed, I should point out that he probably saved me a needless electrician visit by catching an issue that was stumping me (a circuit breaker that had not completely been reset).
So. All that was good, and should have earned him in the range of a four or five. But the timeliness of communcation was simply almost unnacceptable. He apologized for it a couple times, and I appreciated that. This was to set up meetings, to confirm times, and even to discuss future business. And his inability to respond in a timely manner to communcations (it did not matter if those were pages, emails, or calls), I think, is both due to the need to spend some time with this family combined with doing lots of work for other jobs (12 hour days, I think). I do not fault the guy for wanting to spend time with the family, and my items were definitely not an emergency. But good/timely responses can make all the difference. I think his is a single owner/proprietorship, and maybe this is just par for the course with handymen--the better they are, the better reviewed they get, and the more trouble they having keeping up with everything. But beware--his problem in this area had me almost (twice) just giving the job to someone else and writing a more negative review here. But if I did that, I would not have found out that he really does do a good job (at least he did for me).