Signing a contract with Amcor Roofing was the worst mistake I've made in the last ten years. Right from the get-go I should've known I'd made a mistake--after telling me they'd start work by the end of the week, they took months to show up.
The roofers showed up eventually, stripped the older shingles, and replaced them. They left a huge pile of material in our back yard, rather than cleaning them up, per their contract. I'm still finding rusted nails where our nieces, nephews, and pets like to play.
After the roof work was completed, there was more lag time before Ricky came to repair and replace our eavestroughs, fascia, and soffits. The work didn't look that good, but the house is old--I assumed that was the reason it looked so bad. Prior to completing the fascia, soffits, etc., I and my wife were pressured to give the company money by the company owner--I believe his name is James. Our liaison having left the company at some earlier point--the company owner claimed that he was "crazy."
The company owner also claimed that Ricky was one of his best men, who'd been with the company for years--five minutes after Ricky had told me he'd only been with the company for a couple of weeks.
The company owner asked that we give Ricky the last third of the payment, minus five hundred dollars. "Honestly, there isn't five hundred dollars worth of work left to do, so it's not fair to hold back thousands," he said.
"What about the inspection the contract says we're supposed to have?" I asked.
"You can do it now," says Amcor. "Now" was in the winter AT NIGHT.
When I expressed reluctance to pay more than I already had until the work was finished, the owner held his workers' lives over our head--if we didn't pay him, he wouldn't be able to pay them. Did we want the workers to suffer? I was naive--I did feel bad for Ricky, and I did give him a cheque for everything but the last thousand dollars.
Ricky came by a few weeks after that, did some more work but still couldn't finish because by this time there was ice on the roof. In spite of this he pressured my wife to give him a cheque for the rest of the contracted fee. She succumbed to the pressure and gave him a cheque for the rest. As soon as I found out, I began making regular calls to Amcor to ask when the work would be complete.
I made those calls for months. I wrote down dates of conversations and names of people I'd had them with, only to be told later that no one of that name worked for the company.
Finally, a subcontractor hired by Amcor called and said she'd been hired by Amcor to take care of unfinished work. She'd be by to finish whatever work remained the next day. That evening I wandered around the house, examining Ricky's "work", making notes of things that hadn't been done. Doing so depressed me greatly--yes, there was new metal stuff where there wasn't before, but it didn't look any better. I didn't feel good about it, but I didn't really know what I was looking at and was more or less resigned to living with what I had.
The next morning, the subcontractor did come by. She took all of two steps into my yard, saw the soffit/fascia/eavestroughing and said "This all has to come down." Not only was it terrible work on a basic craft level, but the way the soffits had been installed would be actually make things worse in the event of a fire. Every non-roof shingle component of the previous work was torn down and replaced. And it looked good. Even so, there were a few outstanding issues--I'd been told by our original liaison that a metal covering preventing leaves and debris from getting into the gutters was now standard, so it didn't need to be specifically included on the contract because it came automatically. Ricky had started to put something on top of the gutters--nothing useful, it warped and wasn't attached, but there was something there for about half of our eavestrough. That was one of the things I'd been bugging Amcor to come and put on for the previous months.
Along with everything else Ricky did, his eavestrough covering was removed. It was terrible, worse than having nothing, the subcontractor said, and said she'd install a solid metal barrier with holes for water in it--which is what I thought we were getting in the first place. That covering was never installed; months later the subcontractor claimed she'd never said that she'd install the covering, but had offered to contingent on us also getting additional work done.
Her people also broke one of our windows. After a few weeks, they replaced the pane, but they left the broken glass inside the frame between panes that can't be moved.
Finally, more than a year after the work had started, several months after we'd been pressured to pay the contracted fee in full, it seemed like the work was finished. The soffits, etc. looked good. The roof looked...OK. Better, anyway.
But regardless of how it looked, the roof we had before Amcor's was installed WORKED better. One section in our dining room was leaking a little. Paint was bubbling, it was damp, but we never saw water drip onto the floor.
This winter, our roof has developed several major leaks it didn't have prior to Amcor "fixing" it. A couple months back, windows in the front of the house had streams of water running down them and freezing. When I called Amcor to ask why my new roof was leaking, I was told that water freezes and melts. Seriously. They explained ice melting. When I asked what they were going to do to fix the roof they installed that was leaking, they said the only thing they could do was send someone over to clear the snow off our roof. Normally they'd charge 7 or 800 dollars for this service, but they'd do it for us for $500, because "We care about our clients." I asked to speak to the guy's supervisor, only to be once again have how water freezes and melts explained to me.
At that point, a part of me gave up. I felt I'd been conned, but I didn't see how there was anything I could do about it. I gave up. Then a couple days ago, I noticed that another window in a completely different area of our house had water running down it. I didn't even bother calling Amcor, because why bother? I felt I'd been conned, but again, what could I do about it?
Tonight I got home to discover water dripping steadily from two different locations in my living room ceiling. Two chairs and several books were soaked before we noticed. The ceiling is now so warped that I'm semi-expecting part of it to fall in overnight. Like the two different windows, these leaks are in areas which never had the problem in the ten years my wife and I have owned the house.
I went to the computer, googled Amcor Roofing, found this site and decided to tell me story in full, in the hopes that it helps others avoid the financial and emotional burden I and my family continue to endure because of our dealing with Amcor Roofing.
Tomorrow I'll be contacting a lawyer. I don't know how I'll be able to afford the services of a good one, but I simply cannot sit on my hands and watch my house collapse around me without doing SOMETHING. No matter what happens now, I'll always feel like a failure--a mark who got conned by a company that took nearly $20,000 of money I borrowed because my roof needed to be fixed, and left me and my family with a roof substantially less effective than the one we had previously.
