I would like to start by saying that this bathroom renovation was done 5 years ago, and we have had a chance to live with the lack of workmanship, skill and care provided by JMH Canada over that period of time. I was not going to write a review because I wanted to put the whole terrible experience behind me, but I felt compelled to share my experience with those looking a contractor.
We hired Mark and JMH Canada to do a complete gut of our main second floor bathroom. At the time of our initial meeting, I stated that there were two main things out of the whole scope of work that I needed to have "perfect", and if he could not do it, I would be happy and willing to hire a specialized trade to complete that part of the work. The two things were to fix all of the plumbing issues properly and the tile installation in the shower and bathroom floor has to be near perfect. Mark said that he would be able to do both these things perfectly, as well as everything else.
Not to get into every detail of everything that went wrong, and that was pretty much everything, the tile and plumbing work was abysmal.
TUB SURROUND TILING: Mark had installed the marble tile in the tub surround. The tiles on the adjacent walls did not line up with the main wall (it is a horizontal linear tile pattern). I looked at it that evening and mentioned it did not look right the next morning. He completely agreed and ripped it all down and started over again. In the process of taking the tile off the semi hardened thin set, some of the marble tiles got chipped and damaged. He reused them anyway so that he did not have to pay for replacement tiles and we are now living with it. And because the thin set was almost hardened underneath the tile, there was no longer a nice new, smooth surface for the tile to be reinstalled on top of. So our tile in the tub surround is lumpy with uneven edges.
FLOOR TILE: We decided to splurge and go with a heated floor. After seeing the work that was done around the tub, I sat down with Mark a second time to reiterate that I wanted high quality tile work on the floor. I mentioned that the tile I purchased is very expensive, and the installation of a herringbone pattern was more difficult than a standard floor. And I was willing to spend more money on a tile specialist to lay the floor. He assured me that it was not going to be an issue as he had a good tile guy. His tile installer came a few days later and installed the heated floor cable, then poured the self levelling concrete. During this process, he found that one of the cables was not sitting below the level of the concrete so he took his staple gun and stapled it down into the wet concrete ... blind. I was watching him do this, but I figured he was a professional and he knew what he was doing. In the process of installation, he made a mess all over the walls in our hallway and basement, and then he decided to dump the extra concrete down our sink to clean his bucket!!! Obviously, that ended up messing up the plumbing in our sink, and I ended up replacing the section of plumbing where the concrete hardened. I never bothered to mention it to Mark because after all that has gone wrong, I just wanted them out of my house. Normally, after installing the concrete over a heat floor, the electrician would come to connect the heated floor to make sure it was working before installing the floor tile. Of course this was not done. So the tiler came a couple of days later to tile the floor. Made a mess again, but did a nice job with the tiling. No uneven edges, the floor was smooth and level. A couple of days later the electrician came to hook up the floor. He discovered that there was no connection and that there was a cut somewhere in the cable. Surprise surprise. I told Mark, he completely agreed to fix the mistake without argument. So up comes all the tile, the concrete, and the heated floor cable. Approximately 5 more weeks go by before we get Mark to come back with the new heated floor cables and finish the job. Mark had to repair part of the subfloor that was damaged during the demolition of the first flooring installation. When he was done with the repair, I inspected it and when I stepped on that section, there was a bit of give to it. I mentioned it to Mark, but he said that it will be nice and solid once the concrete goes down. I shouldn't have believed him, but I just let it go. Big mistake. Mark decided to tile the floor himself, and as expected, made a gigantic mess of it. The tiles are uneven, there are corners that are sticking up (where we are constantly jamming our bare feet into), and other areas where the corners are dipping down. At this point I just paid him and wanted him to get out of our house. After 6 months, the grout started to break up and fall out because the floor is flexing in the aforementioned area! Now after 5 years, 50% of the grout has chipped away and 25% of the tiles are crunching and moving beneath our feet. We are now avoiding walking in centre of our bathroom because we do not want to crack a tile. I have been doing some online research to see if there is any fix for this, short of ripping up the entire floor for a third time. There isn't. So now we are looking at another $4000-$5000 in labor and materials to fix this disaster.
There are so many other things that went wrong with this renovation, I could go on and on. If you want to know about them, feel free to contact me. Otherwise, I do NOT recommend using JMH Canada.
