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Wednesday, November 22, 2000

When I asked Bob Cinciripini how he might be described by the contractors he complained about, he replied:

Betty and Bob Cinciripini of Braddock show the area where their front porch roof meets a metal awning. A gutter fastened to the front of the awning doesn't keep water from leaking onto their porch. (Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette)

"Chronic complainer."

He was right on the money.

Cinciripini, 64, and his wife, Betty, 58, live in a three-story frame home in Braddock that is a work in progress. They lived next door for 25 years, had a fire there and bought their current home in November 1994. The cost-conscious couple have been fixing it up ever since.

Cinciripini, a retired mechanic, and his wife, the parents of two grown children, have succeeded in getting a lot of work done for a very reasonable cost.

The house has a new roof, blown-in insulation, new light green vinyl siding, 22 replacement windows, new gutters and down spouts, new drywall in several rooms and other improvements.

The labor and materials cost for all that work was $10,000.

I couldn't believe it, either.

But the self-described chronic complainer isn't happy.

The front porch roof, to which a large metal awning was attached, leaks where they meet. And a white gutter fastened with rivets and metal bolts to the front of the green metal awning doesn't catch all the water that comes off the roof. He has other complaints, of course, but those are the two major ones.

In his numerous, sad-story phone calls to me, Cinciripini make it sound as though the repair/remodeling work done to the house was horrendous. I've seen worse, much worse.

Because home repair and remodeling are two of the many skills I've never mastered, I called Rodney Harkness, a veteran home inspector with Harkness Inspection Report Services. He also is a member of American Society of Home Inspectors. I asked him to meet me at the Cinciripini home at 10 a.m. Monday.

The Cinciripinis showed us the inside and outside of their home. They pointed out the leak in the front porch roof. Moments later, Harkness, who had spotted the probable cause from the front window in the second floor master bedroom, was on the roof.

He said the new shingles and drip edge didn't extend out enough from the roof to allow water to flow into the gutter. It turned out Bob Cinciripini had been told that before, but he didn't want to have the porch roof redone because of the cost of the materials.

Harkness, who also is a member of the American Association of Housing Science Consultants, said the gutter that ran along the front of the metal awning that covered the rest of the front porch wasn't properly attached.

We worked our way from the first to the third floor and looked at almost every one of the 22 windows in the house. Harkness said the windows, several of which were the type used in new construction, were made by at least six different manufacturers. None bore the name of the manufacturer.

We looked at the box gutters, the crumbling mortar of one of the chimneys, the vinyl siding that wasn't properly overlapped in a few places and improperly nailed in other places.

When we finished two hours later, Harkness and I stood outside the Cinciripini home in the biting wind and discussed what we had seen.

"They got a lot of work done for the money they spent," he said. "There are some things that could have been done better, primarily the shingle work on the front porch roof, but I've seen worse."

I called David W. Cressman of Cress Enterprises in Scottdale. With the exception of the gutter attached to the front porch awning, he had done all the other work, primarily by himself.

Cressman, 67, said Bob Cinciripini kept asking him to do things that weren't included in the contract, some for which he didn't charge.

"I ended up doing about $20,000 worth of work for $10,000," Cressman said. "Bob didn't want to spend a lot of money on anything. I used a variety of replacement windows, some new, some used, because he didn't want to buy new ones from the same manufacturer."

Cressman, who removed two layers of old shingles and patched the roof before installing the new shingles, said he offered to redo the front porch roof for free if Cinciripini paid for the shingles. Cinciripini refused.

Clarence "Buddy" Nicholson of Connellsville, who helped Cressman with the siding and insulation work, said Bob Cinciripini was the "most difficult person" he has ever worked for.

"He complained about everything. I heard him on the telephone with the electric and telephone companies complaining about his bills."

Cinciripini, who correctly assessed what Cressman, Nicholson and others said about him, said he will confer with a home inspector such as Harkness the next time he wants work done at his home.

I told him that was a good idea.

The Web site for the American Association of Housing Science Consultants is www.aahsc.com.

Lawrence Walsh can be reached at 412-263-1895. His e-mail address is lwalsh@post-gazette.com.