Maurice from Toronto

They did the wrong job badly. Eight hundred bucks down the tubes. Back in the winter, we developed a slow leak in our flat roof. Although we know that roofs can be deceptive as to where actual problems are, it was very clear that this was from one small dip in the roof near the front. Pro Roofers had done some decent shingling for us a couple of years earlier, so we called them. I didn't realize that flat roofs are harder to fix than shingled roofs. Because we liked the guy we dealt with then and now (Jorge), we weren't as critical as we should have been. He sent three guys who spent hours apparently redoing all the seams in the roof. I assumed this was a precaution on top of fixing the known leak, and made me feel better about spending the eight hundred bucks. It turned out they didn't do anything much about the actual leak, which got worse within weeks. We called them to come back and fix it. They sent one guy this time. He didn't speak English well and we weren't sure he understood the problem, which again wasn't fixed. At this point I was starting to get pretty mad and called them again. They said with an old roof like ours, it was better to replace the whole roof and seemed reluctant to send anybody over again. So much for the one year warranty on repairs. They should have told us that in the first place, but the sales guy said he was just trying to save us money. Thanks a lot for not telling me up front. After the first time they fixed it, I refinished the ceiling. That just got wrecked pretty quickly. They quoted about six or seven hundred K to replace the roof, but with an eight hundred dollar discount. We figured we were stuck with them, but called some other companies just to be sure. We found one that was great, really clear about what they would do, looked at the roof and knew exactly what Pro Roofers had done wrong - we'd have been better off if they'd just sent one guy with a bucket of tar. Without a discount or any bargaining at all, they quoted a better price than Pro Roofers "discounted" price and we now we have a good new roof that I'm sure was done correctly. Since I originally posted this review, Professional Roofers has refunded the original eight hundred dollars.

There's just doing the job, and then there's going above and beyond. Jason and Canadian Roofing excelled at both. It's difficult to make it clear how good Canadian Roofing was without mentioning how bad the company we had originally engaged was. We have a flat roof on a hundred-year-old semi. We began with an odd but manageable dampness that seemed to just require some decent patching. By the time the previous company was done with us, we had a crisis situation with an extremely bad, fast drip that would obviously require a new roof. The previous company did the wrong job badly, and then wanted to charge us for a new roof, claiming their warranty was unserviceable because the old roof was in such bad shape. If they had simply done the original job correctly, it wouldn't have been a big deal, even if there'd been problems. We gave up on them and their worthless "discount" and tried Jason. He was fantastic. The job wasn't cheap, but it was still cheaper than the previous guys would have been. I originally intended to interview two or three competitors and go with the best, but Jason did such a good job of analyzing the problem and clearly explaining what needed to be done that we decided to just go with him before our first meeting was over. The previous guy had been all airy-fairy with no clear explanation of anything (they'd done some good shingling for us a couple of years previously, so we trusted them more than we should have: we didn't know that shingling is a much easier job than fixing a flat roof.) Canadian Roofing put the right number of men on the job, with proper resources to support the ongoing work. Because of continuing bad weather and a backlog in demand, they had trouble fitting us in quickly enough, but they did get to the job surprisingly quickly, and had contingency plans in place to cover us in case a particular situation required it (it didn't, because they got done ahead of schedule.) We would happily hire them again, but are confident we'll never need to!

Francisco and his crew, including his son, did a fantastic job. We have some hundred-year-old pine floors, several of which were painted with very old oxblood paint. They never looked good, but Francisco sanded, stained and coated them, and now they look fantastic. He used a neutral oil-based stain and several coats of polyurethane coating, which he had to apply by hand because there were largish gaps between the floorboards. He's clearly a perfectionist, and there were no little bits of paint missed along the edges and so on. The job included a landing and a flight of stairs. I was surprised that he was able to easily handle the rounded lips of the stairs, and absolutely amazed that he was able to get in between the bannister support legs, which are not even two inches apart. I wish I had been able to see how he did that, but the area was sealed off with plastic sheeting to contain the dust. He and his crew showed up when they said they would, and worked efficiently until the job was done. It took about four days (the sanding took two days). His price was quite reasonable, probably because as an owner-operator, he did some of the work himself and we weren't paying extra to deal with a separate sales staff. I would recommend him to anybody. We plan on having him back to do a couple more floors that couldn't be done at the time.

I normally take warranties with a grain of salt. There tends to be so much fine print with such strict warranty periods that I don't take them seriously. So I was very pleasantly surprised with the warranty service I received from Professional Roofers this week. We had a new roof done by them a couple of years ago, and some window guys this year said there was a bit of a problem around the dormer. Professional Roofers sent two guys immediately when I called (I couldn't even remember the invoice number or anything, but they had all the info on file). They blamed the window guys, but I didn't care because they fixed up the problem area without any argument and also checked another part of the roof, where they found another potential issue (probably the fault of some brick masons that did some work last year). They fixed that also. There was no charge and I didn't even have to sign anything. Very well satisfied. If there was any problem with the original installation, I wouldn't count that against them because I remember the weather had turned extremely cold that day and the installers worked into the dark to get the job done.

Wow. What a fantastic experience. We needed to have our 1910-era water service upgraded from corroded iron to modern copper. It wasn't a huge job, maybe 14 feet from the city connection to our meter in the front of the basement. We'd put it off because we thought it would mean ripping up our porch and garden - nope! Another plumber told us we had to get it done right away, along with some other work. We'd had good luck with Mr. Plumber in the past, so figured we should at least get a second opinion. The estimator Igor gave us an immediate no-nonsense quote, and said the extra work could be done, but wasn't necessary. Alex & Alex showed up a day later and did the whole job in three hours! This included digging a small, but deep, hole in the front garden (they were careful not to kill any plants needlessly) and ripping up a small bit of the basement floor. They filled the hole back in and concreted the floor seamlessly; they even had to take a short break for the gas and Bell locators to make sure everything was cool. Maybe I'm exaggerating a bit - it might have taken three hours and fifteen minutes. I think I signed the work order at 8:00 AM and paid them off at 11:15. One of the Alex's confirmed that the extra work our first plumber said was necessary was a waste of time - he'd do it if we wanted, but sad why waste the money? Here we were practically begging them to upsell us, and they told us to not bother. How often does that happen in today's world? Extremely happy and impressed.