Man and a Van Handyman

Benjamin at Man and a Van Handyman is great. We had just bought a new place and there were lots of small and medium size projects needed to really make it livable and he knew exactly what to do. He repaired some stuck old doors, installed shelves and cabinets, replaced hard to reach lights, and more. He's above and beyond professional and has a good eye for detail. I found him to be a great value. Highly recommended!

Ben repaired the concrete in front of our commercial space. He was responsive and initially came on time, for the work done. Why the 1 star then? His work didn't last 6 months. In addition, while we tested his fix when he was there and things worked fine, his work caused a series of door related issues later after the concrete expanded. I texted him with no response back. Wouldn't recommend. Photo is after the fix

I strongly caution you against hiring Ben. In replacing a door he significantly damaged the frame. Amidst a variety of other unprofessionalism that I have added details to below, I requested that the damage be repaired. Within a few hours, he billed me for more than the original estimate and refused to arrange for a time to repair the damage, despite my reasonable offer to reimburse him for out of pocket immediately. He proceeds to invoice me for the original amount and adds a 10% late fee for every month. This finally comes to a head when he sues me in Small Claims Court. Frankly, given Ben's unprofessionalism, I was grateful for the judge to help me manage this issue. So, unless you like settling up bills in small claims court, I would not engage with him. Below are more details:

Late January, I connected with ManVan Handyman via Yelp to install rain protection on my backdoor.

Benjamin came to my home and gave an estimate of 4 hours + materials. We scheduled the work for the following week.

Ahead of the workday, I asked Ben if I needed to prepare anything. He said nothing.

Ben arrives late and parks his truck with a dog in it on the sidewalk in front of my house. I am working in my office in the front of the house. I introduce myself and make it clear that I am available should he need anything. Ben makes unprofessional statements about my appearance.

After inspecting the area, Ben leaves my apartment, unlocking the front door without my permission, and then goes to purchase supplies. He returns by just walking in the now unlocked front door, without warning. His car is again parked illegally on the sidewalk with a dog in it. Dog starts barking.

Ben commences work. He does not lay down a tarp or do any preparation of the location. He proceeds to use a saw and damage the door frame. There is a crack in the trim surrounding the door on the front and back frame and a 1.5 inch gap between the molding and the floor. There is a lot of smudging and dirt and dust everywhere. See photos below. Ben admits that he made a mistake and mismeasured the door and there is additional work needed.


Ben has also invited a colleague into the house without my permission. Ben has also brought in his lunch and has created a mess on my kitchen table. His dog is barking from the car in the front of the house. A neighbor rings my doorbell and informs me they will call Animal Welfare if something is not done about the dog barking from the illegally parked car out front. When I tell Ben this, he replies, "you know, that's just the way it's going to be." I tell him he needs to address the issue immediately.

He says he will and instructs his colleague to finish. I ask Ben when and how he will complete the job, as there is much damage to the molding surrounding the door. Ben says he can have someone finish the job that week and we should identify a time via text message. Ben leaves to deal with his dog. I have to specify all of the cleanup items for the colleague. Dust is still everywhere.

The next day I receive an invoice from ManVan Handyman for $1200 to cover the first day of the work and materials. Note, this work that resulted in damage to my door frame was already above the original estimate.

I reply saying the I will gladly reimburse for any out of pocket expenses that they send me receipts for. However, I note, I will not pay for any labor until the project is completed.

The person on the text (I believe it is the colleague who came to clean up) replies by saying this is not their policy and they will not send someone to complete the job until the original invoice is paid.

I request a phone call, and on that conversation I reiterate my offer to:
Reimburse for any out-of-pocket expenses if they can send me copies of receipts
To schedule a time for the team to complete the job
I note that this job needs to be completed with professionalism as there were multiple issues with the service provided by Ben initially

The person on the phone says they will talk to the team. I follow-up a few days later, they say they will not schedule a time to repair the door and that I must pay the entire invoice. They continue to send me invoices for work, and are include a $120 / month late fee. This late fee is far beyond a reasonable amount and represents a 100% annual interest rate on the invoice.

In the meantime, I have contacted an alternative contractor to repair the work on the door. Their estimate is $800 for materials and 8 hours of labor at $127.5 / hour. So $1820 to repair the damage they caused.

Great company and owner Benjamin and team!
Very very happy with the personal attention, care, communication and professionalism that they provide.
Several jobs completed, small and big jobs.
Highly recommend.

I hired Ben about a month ago to install some drywall and to replace a bathroom faucet for me. He did a decent job on the drywall and didn't charge for material costs like a lot of other contractors did. The one star comes from creating a mess and damage as he performed his job. He dented my ceiling and walls and did a shoddy job at covering it up/he did not let me know. As for the bathroom faucet, he only decided to install the faucet and not the drain and left metal shavings literally everywhere (again also didn't let me know he only performed a portion of the job).

On a separate note, I wfh and I stepped ups stairs for a couple minutes. When I came down he was sitting at my dining table where I work, with his mask off eating lunch and using my mug as a prop for his phone while he was laughing at some news video. Overall just really bad etiquette.

If you hire him, I'd monitor him closely, make sure he cleans up after himself and set ground rules beforehand.

I hired Benjamin to install a shower door in my newly remodeled bathroom. Long story short, he dropped one of the panes of tempered glass. The glass exploded up to 10 feet in all directions leading out of the bathroom, cracked the new shower pan, put numerous small nicks into the walls, and scraped up the floorboard. Ben also had to go to the ER, having been cut on the arm by the glass. I don't fault him for the accident, but my review centers around all the elements that led up to the accident and the aftermath.

- Carelessness: After I helped him bring the shower door into the apartment, he unpacked it and leaned one glass pane against the wall while he went to install the other one. I wasn't in the room, but I heard a crash. When I came out, I realized the glass had slid out against the laminate floor, only stopping because it hit one of the legs of my couch. On the way down, the glass scraped off the corner of my wall as well as the edge of a glass shelf. The shower pane also had some chips in it from this incident. When Ben came out, he was speechless and didn't acknowledge his mistake or offer any way to resolve the issue. I told him I'd contact the company to see if we can order a replacement pane. We decided to carry on with the work, installing the glass and replacing it with a new, undamaged piece at a later date.

- Lack of attention to detail: For one of the installation steps, Ben had to cut a stainless steel tube. He did this inside the bathroom with a handsaw. While watching him, I noticed that he kept knocking the wall tiles with the end of the tube while cutting. I later found a pretty large chip in one of the tiles that was likely a result of this (and not the glass falling). There were lots of other small things like leaving red markings on the grout that I was not able wash off (even with a Mr. Clean Eraser) and the shower rail not being level (causing the the sliding door to slide around on its own).

- Lack of ownership: When Ben dropped the glass pane, his very first reaction was a loud "That's a manufacturer defect!" In my mind, the glass shattering is clearly a result of the drop combined with the earlier incident of the glass sliding out. At no point throughout the entire work and aftermath did Ben seem to take ownership of what happened. He blamed the difficulty of the project and the manufacturers. I admit that installing the shower door should have been a two person job. I don't think I realized the scope of the work. However, Benjamin should have advised against continuing if he felt like the job would be too difficult. While I appreciate that he wants to finish what he's hired to do, he puts both him and the work in jeopardy by not making these professional judgments.

- Poor crisis management: Ben naturally (and understandably) had to run out to the ER to deal with a bleeding arm. After he was patched up and deemed okay, he sent his assistant some photos of his condition which she forwarded to us. However, he did not say what we should do in the meantime. My girlfriend and I ended up cleaning up the glass (we continued to find glass for weeks after the incident). When he came back from the hospital, one of the first things he did was ask us to pay him for the three hours he worked. He did not thank us for cleaning up after him, examine the damages, or make any offers to rectify the situation.

Overall, Ben is probably fine for small projects. And when things go right, he's probably perfectly competent at what he does. But what I've come to realize working with contractors and handymen throughout a bathroom remodel process is that what happens when issues crop up (which they always do for larger projects) is almost more important than anything else. Ben's work and attitude did not inspire confidence.

I do want to leave this review with one positive note: His secretary Cathy was extremely apologetic, professional, and responsive in helping me sort out the issue with their insurance. In addition, their insurance was prompt in reimbursing me for a replacement shower door and the labor needed to install it. I was also going to have the floorboards redone (which they also promised to cover), but I have not been able to arrange that work yet. All the other nicks and scratches I am either trying to fix myself or just live with them.

Very happy with the process and outcome of working with Ben. I needed help anchoring a massive bougainvillea to an exterior concrete wall. Ben was quick to respond for scheduling and available to meet soon also. He listened to what my goal was, proposed a better solution than I originally had in mind, and was able to start later the same day. His pricing was transparent and reasonable. He clearly communicated throughout and completed the project well under the time than he'd originally estimated.

TL;DR
Like others have mentioned, Benjamin's only good quality is his availability. Benjamin came in for a simple wall patching and failed to fix the wall twice. When we asked for a refund, he said no, remarking that he has "a lack of empathy" for his clients.

Edit:

Seems like Benjamin has replied and lied about his work. Please see the other 1 star reviews people have made for him, feel free to review the snapshots of our conversations with him and don't fall for his lies. My hope is that you'll avoid the same pitfalls that we did.

Cheers,
Ben

Long Form:

We had Benjamin come in and fix two holes in our wall. On his first attempt, he taped over the larger hole and then plastered both. After blasting them with a heat gun so they would dry, he painted over them. There were many things wrong with this first attempt:
- You could clearly see the dent left in the wall from the smaller hole, since he didn't use enough plaster.
- You could see the tape through the paint for the larger hole
- Many, many bubbles formed in the plaster of the larger hole
- Even though his website says he specializes in retexturing, he didn't do any. - His paint job was completely different from the rest of the wall.

We asked Benjamin to come back and amend his work. In our later conversation over text, he emphasized doing this "for free", as if it's some sort of extra perk, when instead fixing his own mistakes should be a given. Then, he mentioned he'd have to come back to follow up and so he could properly sand and paint the wall. If that was the right way to do it, why didn't he do it the first time?

Again, there were many issues with his work:
- Both of the holes developed even larger cracks than his first attempt
- He plastered over huge sections of our wall unnecessarily, leaving more for us to sand down and repaint.
- He used tape over the larger hole, when cutting it open and adding new gypsum board was required. He admitted this over text.

After contacting many other contractors and reaching a consensus that our wall would have to be redone again, we asked Benjamin for a refund. He responded with unexpected vitriol, talking about how we were judging his work before completion. I cannot emphasize enough: Benjamin was already on his second attempt at fixing a simple problem when he said this. He had already declared the work over and done with. Then, he blamed our existing wall, the only thing he didn't need to fix, for the cracks that had formed in his patch. He said that because the crack appeared after he left, it wasn't his responsibility. If the drywall he put in cracks while drying, isn't that his responsibility?

For some reason, he also threatened to take longer to finish the job, saying "I told you this job would have taken another hour to complete and I would have capped it at an hour, but that ship has sailed". He is now attempting to hold our wall hostage and extort us for another $280 for a wall he has already left wrecked twice. When asked about this, he glosses over having already ruined the wall once, instead saying it's not fair to judge him on his unfinished second attempt, which has cracked already, requiring a third attempt.

When asked to empathize with the predicament he'd left us in, Benjamin said "I leave my emotions out of my business, thank you for noticing my lack of empathy". For someone who espouses integrity as a business value, Benjamin certainly displays very little of it.

We are now worse off than we were before, since we still have to hire another contractor, who will have to cut out Benjamin's poor workmanship over the hole itself, sand down the rest of the wall he ruined, and then do what we had originally hired Benjamin to do.

TL;DR: We hired Benjamin to recaulk two showers and a bathtub. In less than 90 days, his work had significantly started to fall apart (see photos) and the deterioration has continued rapidly. When informed about this, Benjamin offered a partial credit that wouldn't fully cover the amount of time required to fix his work (he charged $460 originally but only "credited" us $240). If we took up his offer, we'd essentially be paying him more money to "fix" his unsatisfactory original work as it has to be completely redone. Interpersonally, Benjamin has come across as slightly unprofessional which has added a layer of discomfort to the entire engagement. Based on our experience and other 1 star reviews, working with Benjamin is a gamble that I wouldn't recommend taking.

More detail below:

1. Benjamin's work lacked attention to detail which resulted in ugly work. We actually didn't bring this up with Benjamin initially because we were more concerned with functionality rather than aesthetics.

2. We hired Benjamin to reseal our bathtub but a gap remains. The caulk in the showers has been consistently falling apart. Within a couple of weeks, Benjamin's work started to deteriorate. By the 3 month mark, it became clear that we would have to hire somebody else to redo Benjamin's work.

3. When I contacted Benjamin about the issue, he didn't offer to fix the issue free of charge. Instead, he "credited" about half of his original charge ($240) to our "account" (we paid via venmo). Essentially, if we wanted him to fix his work, we would have to pay him more money. We would risk falling into a cycle like the ones described in other 1 star reviews where we'd be paying Benjamin to continuously fix his own work.

4. The email exchanges with Benjamin bordered on sassy, passive aggressive, and unprofessional in tone. They were't bad but just added to an overall negative experience.

5. Benjamin left a big mess, and we had to clean up after him.

6. He was very talkative which wouldn't have been an issue at all had he performed fast/high-quality work.

Ben has been responsive, personable and a great guy doing the job right. Prices are fair and outcomes are solid.

Fixed my door! Great personalities, clean, efficient. Responds quickly. Works at an hourly rate.