No Luck With Contractors

For a year and a half now our walkway beside our driveway has been nothing but dirt.

Finally, after Christmas, we were ready to do something about it. We decided, after looking at several options, to go with stained, stamped concrete. It's concrete, but you stamp it to look like stone, wood, tile, etc. and make it whatever color you want. We chose a flagstone stamp and a silver color with a charcoal border to compliment the gray in our pink brick. The pictures in the catalog and the examples in the show room were beautiful.

We should have sent the contractor away the minute he tried to pull a fast one on us--not putting the silver color in the concrete mix. (He thought he could get away with no color since concrete is gray, er, "silver.") Carroll called him on it and he quickly straightened up and learned that Carroll is no fool.

Let me tell you...this guy slopped the color in--not following the appropriate measurements, mind you, and slopped the stamp on. You can imagine the sick feeling we got as he was finishing up the project and we were realizing that it was NOT going to look like the examples in the catalog and showroom. Carroll sent him away before he sealed the yucky color in and didn't allow him to finish the retaining wall he was building for us.

The most horrifying thing for me was the color or lack there of...it was the most drab gray concrete I had ever seen. I can't tell you how depressing it was. For Carroll, the stamp job was the worst.


We toyed with the idea of having the surface stained, but as we took a closer look, this job was so bad that we were going to have to get rid of it and start over. So, we hired someone to chisel the overlay away. And now we are using real flagstone, which is a beautiful color by the way, and Carroll is doing it himself.


I think we are done with contractors for a while.