LJ Designs Studio

When a job goes well, as customers, we are pleased. When things start going south, a company or individual can truly shine or fail miserably. Lisa failed and failed miserably when what started out as a pretty simple (her words) remodel went sideways immediately. We hired Lisa not only for design ideas and material selection; we also hired her to manage the work from beginning to end. She would get all the subcontractors in and all the work scheduled. While she did not represent herself as a licensed General Contractor, she certainly acted as one and when questioned about it later, she said the flooring contractor served as the GC. I contacted him to verify and he was not pleased with her assertion. He was not a licensed GC either. We wrote checks directly to her for the vast majority of the work. She depended heavily on her subs to coordinate the work for not only themselves, but for her and other subs as well. We actually ended up coordinating directly with subs to get some of the work done. Basically, in the end, she did very little of the actual work she was getting paid to do.

There were too many issues that happened along the way to address here, but let me be clear, she did not do the job she was contracted to do. There were subs that had issues, but we did not hire them, Lisa did. The buck stopped with her, period. She never got that. She was quick to blame others for her failures or even blame us! We corrected/reminded her on numerous occasions and had to continually ask her what was happening next. We barely knew from one day to the next if there was even someone coming to our home in the morning. She would direct us to talk to the subs about the work. When the issues started piling up, she took a vacation. We cut our vacation short to come home and deal with issues. When our daughter had a terrible reactive respiratory issue requiring medical attention due to all the dust, her first words were wondering if we had contacted the flooring sub. She was not concerned about my daughter’s health at all. She was very good at deflecting responsibility. She was also quickly overwhelmed by the work. She had multiple jobs going, as well as teaching a class, and it highlighted her lack of management skills.

I told her from the very beginning that if issues came up, communicate them with me, be honest, come up with a plan, and we can work through them. We were VERY patient but she tested and took advantage of the very limits of our patience when the project that was supposed to take 3 weeks ended up taking 3 months. Her confrontational approach quickly got old.

This “pretty simple job” was one for the books. Some people rose to meet the challenge, learned from mistakes, and corrected them without argument or deflecting responsibility. Others did not. In my opinion, Lisa learned nothing from this. We certainly learned a lot and one thing was, to NEVER hire Lisa J[redacted] to manage even the smallest of jobs.

In the spirit of full disclosure: Lisa did give us a partial refund of her fee. She then turned around and asked the flooring sub to reimburse HER for the money. This was final proof that she did not learn a single lesson or feel her sub par performance was responsible for any of the issues we had. Caveat emptor!