We are building Outdoor Kitchen & Patio with Keystone Home Pros  (Tomball, TX).  I have only 2 words for this company ” Disappointed & NOT Recommend”!

I didn’t try to be rude to share this information but I’d like to tell all my neighbors & friends and all my website fans to be aware of this company!

Before we started this project, we had 4 contractors that bid.  Keystone was one of them, Leonard was the owner and he was the one who came to visit our house.

His price was in the middle of the other 3 bids.

My husband liked this company, Leonard seems to be proud of what he’s doing…
So my husband picked Keystone – we paid $7,500 to start the project.  Once we paid that money, Leonard sent the sub-contractor named “Alex” to start the project pretty much right away.

I told my husband that I don’t like Alex right away!  Alex visited us with no tape measure, and just didn’t impress me at all.   He kept asking the same questions but he didn’t write it down.  My husband also sent him a note for all the details, sizes, height, length and pretty much everything we went over with the owner during the bid.

Alex came back again with another couple guys.  He showed up when My husband wasn’t home.  Alex asked me the same question again about the project.  I asked him back,  didn’t my husband tell you already?  Alex laughed and said, your husband told me “my wife wanted this….my wife wanted that…”  He sounded like he was making fun of me and

what my husband said.

I looked at him very seriously and I said “that is not the part of your job to remember that”

First week, Alex started to frame out the Patio roof, he stopped to drop his people in the morning.  Alex never stayed with his contractor at the job site .

The first week seemed the only week that they worked at our house 6-7 days in row.  They always left lunch boxes and trash all over the patio.  We have the big trash can right next to them and we asked several times to police the trash otherwise we get racoons at night that tear it up (which they did).

Every day after they left (maybe 5pm), we had to come out to clean up nails, brick and their leftover food boxes away.

After the first week, Alex told us he will come back the next day but he didn’t show up show up for another 2 weeks.
He always said he’s busy working to gather materials for our project.

When Alex shows up, my husband has to go over to project scope with him (again) to remind him that he still needs to close in the rafters under the roof, add gutters, fix the holes in my house, cedar wrap the beams, etc. It’s like a new day whenever Alex’s here.

Also, Alex left behind his tools and stuff all over our places, lots of nails, cut offs (boards).  Our backyard was mess!
Whatever that Alex started to do, he will leave it messy for days or weeks!

4th week, Alex only stopped with the roof guy who came to fix the roof .  This was interesting, the roofer dint have a ladder and needed to borrow pretty much everything from us.

And then we just notices that Alex never had the Scaffolding to work at our house at all, he built the bridge from our post.  So our 10×10 cedar  posts that we ordered special were  full of nails and holes after the project was done.

Alex kept disappearing, he sometimes ignored our phone call.
2 months with Alex, we still have hole in our wall!   We decided to talk with Leonard about Alex, all we got from Leonard said “Alex is good person!”.

But we could see that the day after we talked to Leonard, Alex came back to work.  But only for two days (not even full days)!

We sent a follow-up  note to Leonard after another full week of Alex not showing up.  Leonard seemed to be busy (or ignore us) and didn’t take our calls or respond in email!   I don’t appreciate his help at all.

*First 2 months with Alex.  Not a lot of work time!

3rd month with Alex, he told us he wanted to run power for lights and  ceiling fans which we ordered and waited for him to install 2months ago (I mean, if something happened we can’t return the fans at all!)  Alex wanted to cut the inside wall to connect the power line to the outside.  He cut our wall and and did his connections but then left us with a hole for a week!  We couldn’t use our dining table or that area at all.

We tried very hard to get Alex to come back to finish his small little task.  We sent a final email to ask Leonard for different contractor crew or as an option can we stop our contract with Keystone now?

Leonard didn’t reply to  us right away!  he took 2 days to get back to us that he will send someone to work and he called that person as “finisher”!

The finisher came to look our house on first weekend of  the 3rd month but he couldn’t start right away.    But when he started to work, he does really good work!  The finisher stayed at the job site all the time.  If he had subs like the Brick and granit guys he was right there with them from start to finish.  They have tools, scaffolding and they cleaned up every day before they left!

But once they started to do the ceiling, we could tell that something was wrong!  The ceiling looks like its bending – this was made by Alex and the first crew.

So we asked them to stop working and needed a supervisor from Keystone to come and see what happened!

It was Alex again, he spliced a 2X6 (to make it longer) in the center of our roof!  So the plan for a vaulted ceiling is is now changed!  they had to put another big beam to support that tiny beam!

So my patio ceiling wasn’t what I wanted, it became a flat ceiling and lower!

Just to fix the roof problem that Alex left behind – it took 3 weeks!

After finished and fixing the roof (June 9th), we were waiting for BBQ grill and sink for another 2 weeks!

Even though we sent them the note for part numbers and material  for our outdoor kitchen since April 22nd!   I don’t think this company does well on planning ahead!

finally, the finisher started to frame out the outdoor kitchen on the last week of the 4th month into this project.

Long story short, our Patio & Outdoor kitchen project finished on the 5th month, it took 140days to complete but we were told at the start that it finish in 45 days!

So if Keystone sent the 2nd guy who they called “the finisher” to do this project with us, I would give 4 star review for them.  But Since they sent Alex and they didn’t seem to manage this problem very well, I would give them only 1 star.

Every day during 140days, we prayed for them to finished and leave our house!

Lesson learned from Keystone:

1. Make sure you know who will be your sub-contractor before you pay any money.  Make sure it wasn’t Alex!
2. Ask them more specific information, insurance and all material used for the project.  We didn’t get any real answer for how long the after service is.  Especially, we asked for any warranty on our roof?  nobody answers us even now.  Since they finished the job, there was no rain to prove yet!
3. Get more details for quotation they gave to you.  One thing in our quotation, it says only the ‘granite top’ but when we go to pick the granite, they told us that we got only level 1 granite type (which they didn’t specify in the contract!).  Then we found out there are 5 levels of granite, and level 1 is the lowest & cheapest level!
4. Before any changes, ask them for prices!  We got the final bill in total amount for all upgrades!  First, they didn’t break down them for us, they just gave us the total number!
5. Read more reviews about Keystone on Google Reviews.  And do a background check on Better Business Bureau®, FTC and Homeadvisor sites to see the fraudulent practices of this business
6. Make sure you have your home security camera recording when they are working at your house.  We took pretty much all pictures and video, just in case things doesn’t work out and we have some evidence to show!  I’m so glad I have made a note for their working days!

Note: Our project cost $6x,xxx (3/10/2023 – 7/28/2023)

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