A Post Hole Company - No Longer in Business

After 8 years of sub contracting post holes to Bruce where he was ok for the most part I gave him a fence job as I couldn't do it due to injury. Bruce took the job but 6 weeks after he was suppose to start he still hadn't. He asked for $1600 as a deposit to get materials to the site and then disappeared. After 9 months Bruce has still failed to return the money. Every few weeks he will say he is returning it then just avoids all contact again. I will most likely be going to court to over it. Be very careful with giving Bruce any money up front for any job you may hire him for.

Wished I'd read the other reviews on Homestars before using Post Hole. We hired Bruce to build a cedar fence in our backyard. He was generally surly to deal with. I didn't mind so long as the job was done properly but I did find it strange that someone who runs their own business would lack interpersonal skills.

We expressed to Bruce that we were in a rush to have the job done as we were expecting a baby in the coming weeks and wanted the job done before baby arrived. He promised he could start the job in 2 weeks but of course 2 weeks later he was evasive and kept putting us off. He eventually started the job 3 weeks after we were promised.

He did a decent job on the fence though it took about a week to complete what was probably a one-day job for two people. On the last day of the job, I stupidly paid him before he had finished as I had an appointment to attend. He was just finishing up the gate so I thought I was safe to leave him unsupervised.

When I returned I found that the gate was too small for the opening so it left a significant gap which defeated the purpose of having paid extra for a full-privacy fence.

Also, we had gone back and forth on whether or not the posts needed to be capped. It was something we had agreed upon when we first hired him but at the last minute he told me he felt it was unnecessary. In seeing the 'finished' job, I observed that it looked sloppy to not cap the posts.

We called him immediately and right off the bat he admitted to having done a crappy job on the gate. We also said that we felt the posts needed to be capped and he said he could complete that work when he came to fix the gate.

It's been two months and he has yet to show up. After multiple unreturned phone calls, we finally got in touch with him at which point he argued that he couldn't finish the job without more money. We insisted that at the very least he fix the gate and after settling on a date, he simply didn't show up and didn't answer his phone or return our messages to reschedule.

The quality of work that he did was generally acceptable but he's a very difficult person to deal with and totally unreliable. Not someone I would feel comfortable recommending to anyone I know.

Due to the unreliable and irresponsible nature of the company, they nearly destroyed the project. If you wish to make sure that your deck gets completed on schedule, I would strongly suggest that you use someone else.