Mario's Home Renovations Inc

My name is Fred and my family was fortunate that Mario's Home Renovations Inc. was able to complete the work on our home. We bought a nearly dilapidated 100+ year old semi-attached house in Toronto. Everything except the shell of the house needed repairs and replacement. We literally had contractors who told us to walk away from the house...but not Mario. He was confident but honest right from the beginning which I appreciated. This was a business relationship with the goal to successfully renovate my home in a timely manner.

In Mario's own words, the house was a Pandora's box and there was no way to know what problems lay within until the walls were taken down. Having written that, Mario effectively and successfully solved all of those problems. Removing walls, structural reinforcement, wiring, plumbing, asbestos, crooked floors, heating issues, leaky roof...and of course, beautiful finishes.

It was such a blessing to have Mario run everything. Any problems would be brought to Mario and he would take care of it with his team. I heard of horror stories where renovations would be delayed and dragged out. Not with Mario's Home Renovations Inc. Mario is such a hardworking man that the only thing slowing down the project was from waiting for inspections! The entire house was gutted, rebuilt and finished within 6 months. Just amazing! Anybody who has gone through a renovation will appreciate the efficiency at which the work was completed.

Now I chose to be very active in the renovation process. I planned and participated and voiced my opinion. Mario listened and provided experienced advice. Many times we would be in the house trying to make decisions as they became required. But ultimately, we chose to put faith in his experience. It was simply impossible to decide on every little detail of an entire house. If we chose to be so restrictive, the house would never be finished. It was good to let go and let Mario take control of the process.

By the end of the renovations, I believe that we had built an excellent working relationship. I actually believe that Mario worked harder for us as the renovations progressed.

I hired Mario's Home Renovations Inc. because I believed that Mario was the kind of guy that could get things done and he came through in extraordinary fashion. The transformation is breathtaking. The pictures that I have included attempt to show that transformation. Our house went from a dark and claustrophobic structure to a bright and beautiful family home.

Thank you Mario for creating our home!

Mario did our addition at the back of the house and patio design. He did a great job, ontime and left no mess when job was completed. Thank you for your help and support.

This is my attempt to warn people on this company.

I DO NOT RECOMMEND HIRING MARIO!!!

I hired Mario to do a 2 story addition to my home. This included a major renovation for the basement and building two washrooms in the addition. Mario seemed very likable and trustworthy, so I thought we will have a great collaboration. It turned out that Mario's is the most unprofessional and dishonest company I ever had to work with.

I was dealing with his sloppiness, lack of knowledge and dishonesty for almost 8 months, and ended up firing him after paying 83% of the contract value and an additional 18% for "extra" work, which was not part of the contract.

I was robbed by his workers, coincidentally the day after I placed a stop-payment on a check to Mario. A very expensive MacBookPro and an older iPad model were gone missing. There was also an attempt to break into our safe. Although Police is still investigating, we most likely never recover the missing items and also lost significant information residing on the hard-drives. Our credit cards required replacement.

His work is not only sloppy, but also slow. As per the contract, he was supposed to finish the job by the end of November, however at that time our house barely had exterior walls (with no insulation) and only holes for windows. We had already paid Mario 65% of the contract and winter was coming. Time was running to his advantage, because the longer it took him, the more we needed walls and windows in place to get over the cold, so we had to keep him, even though we already realized the magnitude of our mistake. He couldn't care less, became arrogant and impolite and squeezed us for more money because he knew he could. He had us. We were VERY NAIVE in trusting him.

Overall, I went over budget by almost $150,000 to fix his mistakes. Not to mention the stress and suffering seeing ourselves openly cheated and bullied and not being able to do much about it.

Here are a few of the major issues I had with this company:

1) The addition is 2 inches above the old house on the 2nd floor and 1 inch higher on the first floor.

2) There was not one single straight wall built by Mario. Some problems could be fixed with mudding, but some walls had to be completely redone because the studs were incorrectly installed.

3) None of the 3 washrooms he renoed were done right: poor tiling in the basement washroom (I made him redo the entire tiling), poor plumbing in the master bed washroom (had to start from scratch after firing Mario); broken heated floors in my son's washroom.

4) There was poor electrical work. He could have burnt our house down. The ESA discovered that he brought unlicensed electricians on site!

5) His renovations were not up to code. Before firing Mario I noticed cracks and sagging on two beams he had installed. I got my new contractor to open up the walls and realized that for the support posts Mario used 2x4 instead of 6x8 profiles. Mario decided himself to remove a post from the approved plan. He was dishonest stating that his engineer approved to this change. After firing Mario, I called the city inspector for a full inspection. He failed the beam as it was a structural hazard. Apparently, Mario's engineer was not a licensed engineer and could not have approved anything! He put my family at risk.

6) Workers did not come to work on my house for days. Thus, Mario never met discussed deadlines.

7) On extremely numerous occasions, Mario threatened not to return to work unless weekly payments were received, even though he had not progressed in his work.

8) Mario built a porch, supporting my son’s balcony, with a very poor foundation which showed cracks immediately. This was an obvious hazard.

Mario and his team did a wonderful job remodeling our kitchen . They took our wishes into account, were always on time and worked efficiently and neatly. The end result is absolutely stunning and we are very pleased with our new kitchen (they changed the tiles, the countertop and put mirror back splash -which makes our kitchen look a lot more spacious)

We'll be more than happy to refer Mario and his team for any home-improvement jobs.

Thank you!