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Jacinto Munoz Is Not Trustworthy
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About 15 years ago Jacinto Munoz built a wall for my husband. It was 9 feet tall and closed in the back of the 1/2 acre property. He was supervised by our contractor at the time. The wall is beautiful and we had no complaints. My husband hired him again to build a wall 120 feet in length and 6 feet high. I went over the pricing with him. We got no other bids due to our past experience being favorable. I was clear with him that the plants must be protected; plywood placed over the native grasses where they would be making their runs with bricks and plaster and boards on top of the ground cover when they worked the inside of the wall. I went over where they could drive, park, clean cement from the mixer and wheelbarrows, be responsible for their own trash, don’t leave cigarette butts and the guy that smokes has to smoke in one place. I helped in the mornings to lay down the plywood to be sure the most vulnerable areas were covered. I kept reminding him of things like, "don't open your truck door into my flowers." All was going alright until he did not catch one of his (hired that day) laborers taking wheel barrow after wheel barrow with out putting down the plywood. I saw him make one trip and thought that was it as they were working mostly on the other side. I went to do something else that was not in the vicinity and my employee came to tell me the laborer was wearing down the grasses. I immediately went out and started shouting, “What the ***k are you doing?” They scurried to put the boards down. The next day Jacinto had no workers he said because of my behavior. The following day he brought 2 new workers. They were attentive to the plants until Friday (2 days later). I had to leave in the morning. I had been there everyday. Jacinto said he was leaving at 2 pm to make his payroll. They were only working 3 more hours that day after I left. When I returned I picked up a wheelbarrow of broken adobe that were left in the path of working or had slid down the hill onto the grasses. In front of this wall are 6 young fruit trees all tended for the last 3-6 years. The most perfect pear tree had been scraped by a board and had a wound about 10 inches long down to the cambium, in the middle of the trunk. When Jacinto and one of his workers arrived Wednesday ( He did not work Monday or Tuesday because of other jobs) I took them both to see it. I said I assume it’s an accident but it is negligent. In true Jacinto fashion as I’d been observing he took no responsibility and said he knew nothing about it and then with barely a pause he went into how the job would be costing more money because he couldn’t work fast enough due to my demands. Stating I was the most difficult person he ever worked for. I said it was not a good time to talk as I was not in the right mood- that it would be better if he told my husband and me together. He kept pushing saying he would not do more work until he had an agreement about the new price, citing we wanted the wall higher, claiming 2 feet higher. It was in places higher but not the whole 120 feet which, I imagine, could have been calculated and presented to us without any objection. In the beginning of the job he demanded his labor costs up front and specifically said cash would be best. That was to be for the entire job. Yet this past Wednesday with the wall built but no plastering he claimed he had used the $9,000 we gave him and the labor going forward would be added. He tried to explain it to my husband and he wasn’t buying it either. He gathered up his tools, dumped a wheel barrow of adobe plaster in the gravel driveway (When he knew from mud plastering the house that I explained he had to use tarps so the mud wouldn’t get in the gravel), left us 6 full pallets of adobe bricks ( which he said my husband ordered [he said if we paid directly for the materials we would be getting a better price] but they were ordered to his specifications- after all he was the builder. He actually said that day that he would not have known how many bricks to order. Also, in the driveway, all the pallets from the job, and a truckload of sand.
This is your man if you don’t care if he cleans up, indiscriminately changes the price, you don’t have any plants to work around, and claims no responsibility. He does know how to plaster.
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