Last modified: Tue Mar 1 10:29:02 2005

Zanteck Custom Design provides awful service

I hired Zanteck Custom Design, of Annnandale, Virginia to:

1. install an exterior sliding glass door where there was a small window in my dining room
2. add an interior door between the bathroom and the dining room.

Adding the interior door also required:

3. removal of a large vanity from the ground-floor bathroom
4. remodeling the bathroom with a small vanity, mirror & light.

Zanteck said they were finished and walked (stormed?) off the job today. I expected to have a finished project, ready for paint. I don't.

Holistically, the quality of the work around the sliding glass door is pretty good. The exterior siding around the door was replaced and has no obvious defects. The molding around the door looks good. The drywall that was added to replace the plaster is smooth and well done. I am impressed at how well the gap in the floor was filled and how good it looks.

Things wrong with the work for the sliding glass door:

• A power receptacle near sliding door was left with no cover, and is damaged in some way that the cover won't screw on.
• There are minor gouges in the wood-grain laminate on the sliding glass door frame.
• Some of the screws to hold the frame are missing.
• Zanteck never gave us the keys for the sliding door.

I regard these issues as minor; hardly worth mentioning except that I want the keys.

The bathroom work, on the other hand, is not so good. The word "terrible" comes to mind. Much of the problems were in the details, but finicky details are why bathrooms are hard, and therfore why adding an interior door was expected to cost $4000.

Things wrong when they left:

• There is a sizable hole in the floor at the base of the new door. (About 1 inch deep and roughly 8x2 inches wide. It goes down to the subfloor.)
• There is no threshold for the bathroom door. The vinyl flooring curls up at the edge. (A wide enough threshold would have fixed this and the previous problem also.)
• There was no attempt to refinish the hardwood floor where the wall had been.
• The bathroom door is hung backwards from the agreed-upon direction. (Right-hand open vs left-hand open) This is particularly puzzling because Zanteck convinced us to do it left-hand-open, and they must have gone to extra trouble to exchange the doors after we (my wife and I) agreed they were correct.
• The corner where the doorframe molding meets the bathroom tile is really ugly; the 4-ft-tall by 1-inch-wide gap is just filled with smoothed-out caulk. Two tiles at the top corner are now cracked and no longer flat to the wall. (The other tiles at the corner were also broken for no obvious reason -- they were fine after demolition but were broken during door installation ?!)
• There's an big, ugly gap between the vanity and the molding of the door frame.
• They added additional framing around the door, but the horizontal piece and the vertical piece don't meet properly, and the vertical piece is obviously not flat relative to the wall.
• They hung the large mirror that came with the vanity, despite being asked not to do so. (We provided a small medicinie cabinet for that purpose.)
• The large mirror isn't level.
• The large mirror is hung upside-down
• The screws for the hinge of the large mirror are splitting the wood of the mirror frame, and the wood board on the wall. The screws are mismatched and the heads of some are stripped. The mirror looks like it might fall off the wall with use.
• The tiles added under the mirror aren't level or even.
• The original compact, triple-switch for the light/fan/heater is gone and replaced with three separate switches, for no explicable reason.
• The power outlet is close to the shower, despite an explicit request to keep it as far away as possible.
• The electrical work does not conform to the electrical code. (Not even remotely.)
• Behind the large mirror is the medicine cabinet with the small mirror! (WTF?)
• The medicine cabinet is so deeply recessed that you have to stick your finger inside the wall to open it.
• There's an big unfinished hole to the left of the medicine cabinet. (Which turns out to be necessary to open it; see previous.)
• There's also an unfinished hole to the right of the medicine cabinet (also necessary to open the cabinet because it's recessed too far). Inside this hole you can see exposed wiring and electrical conduit, including an electrical junction that is improperly not in a junction box.
• The medicine cabinet looks like it was installed by a drunk; the screws are not straight, nor countersunk.
• The sink is not glued down to the vanity, or otherwise attached in any meaningful way.
• The sink is caulked to the wall poorly, and is already pulling away.
• There are gouges in the wall of the nearby bedroom (apparently from removing the old vanity).
• The plumbing access panel in the dining room doesn't screw closed any longer; the lower screws are stripped.
• The bathroom was left filthy; nails, screws & putty all over the floor. (Mainly objectionable because it presented a hazard to my 15-month-old child.)

While some of these issues are minor, several are substantive:

• Some problems are very disappointing, but probably not so serious that there's anything I can do about them. I hired Zanteck partly because they were inexpensive; I understood the risk of hiring the low bidder. I would include in this category: gouges in the bedroom wall, stripped screws, 1-inch-wide caulk strip, crooked tiles, outlet placement, backwards door direction, crooked mirror, bad framing, et cetera,

• Other problems aren't just disappointing; the work is clearly incomplete or dangerous.
  • The threshold issue is unacceptable. I can see my subfloor! The edge of my vinyl flooring is loose and flapping!
  • The medicine cabinet installation is unacceptable. I can see right into the wall!
  • The large mirror installation is unacceptable. The hinges are so twisted and the wood is so badly split that I'm afraid the mirror will fall (and shatter).

Finally:

• The debris from the job (which had been piled in the street for trash collection) was thrown onto my landscaping and bushes (apparently in petty frustration).

Other comments:

• Communication was difficult. While Danny Hue (the owner) spoke passable english, most of his workers were hard to understand and it was hard to get them to understand what we said to them.
• Even between the contractors, communication was apparently poor. We clearly indicated to Danny that the sliding glass door should be centered on the wall, but this apparently wasn't communicated to the workers, because they cut the hole in the wrong place, causing significant rework for them, and loss of the original 1939 plaster walls for us.
• The only electrical work was to move the existing switch and outlet, and to replace the old light with the new light. Somehow, in doing this, the "electrician" got the wires so confused that he couldn't figure out what happened, and several different electricians each spent many hours trying to fix the problem. Danny seemed to blame us for this problem, and acted like he was doing us a favor by "fixing" the problem, when his workers had caused it in the first place!
• It seems clear that, just as we started becoming frustrated with Zanteck making mistakes and not listening to us, they becaume frustrated with us and stopped trying to do quality work.

I think the root problem was that Zanteck had someone incompetent attempt the electrical work, and they messed it up. This delayed construction for several days while they tried to fix the problem. (And a snowstorm didn't help.) Paying the electricians ate into their profits so that they were losing money on the job and they tried to get out quick.