Do not hire Roberto Mulè: a London contractor review

Who is Roberto Mulè?

Roberto Mulè is a building and construction contractor operating in the greater London area who you should avoid at all costs. His work is poor, his organization is worse, and as director of YesYNot LTD he collected money for a job that he never even started. He had to be taken to court, which he (as YYN) lost, before attempting to close his company and avoid all responsibility. Do not hire him!

Roberto worked for me both as a direct contractor and as a sub-contractor for the building design company We Love Build. At that time he primarily operated under the name Roy Construction or the Roy Construction Group, but he was incorporated as YesYNot LTD. He later reincorporated as Revolution Build LTD (found online here) and even before that was incorporated as Arethusa Restoration LTD. These are his companies that I am aware of and as far as I can tell all of them are essentially defunct—you might be beginning to see a pattern here.

At some point you could also find Roberto on LinkedIn (along with unauthorized photos from inside my home), but thankfully that appears to have been deleted.

Below I will describe how disorganized and ill-managed Roberto’s work was. Worse than that, I will describe how he skipped out on one job entirely and kept the downpayment. I will also describe how even those jobs he did “complete” were often poorly finished. And as a cherry on top of that all I will explain the financial and legal ordeal he forced me through to regain money I paid him for a job he never started. As a bit of a spoiler this debt is still outstanding.

Before I start, however, I have the following takeaway message as someone who was able to observe Roberto’s work closely and would like to save any and all from the hassle I went through:

Do not hire Roberto Mulè.

Why shouldn’t you hire Roberto Mulè?

While Roberto is not completely incapable, I would never personally hire him again and I absolutely recommend everyone else should steer far, far away.

First and foremost he is absolutely lacking from an organizational perspective. He wasn’t able to finish jobs within a reasonable time-frame, even those that he gave himself. During his work for me he consistently over-promised and under-delivered with regard to completion dates. Additionally, he seemed unable to form a consistent work plan or even follow simple instructions.

I had a somewhat contentious relationship with WLB, the original company for whom Roberto acted as a subcontractor. So when he came to me complaining about how they were under-paying him for certain jobs and he wouldn’t even break even, I took that at face value rather than the red flag it should have been. At his request, I paid him extra to cover his “material costs” and then kept him on as the primary contractor for jobs outside of WLB’s scope. This seemed like a win-win: he got extra work and I got someone I thought I could trust—oh how wrong I was.

I, of course, asked him to put everything in writing so I could agree to it before any work could start. Below are a few early “invoices” from him which are particularly light in their level of detail and specificity.

At first I thought these were honest mistakes. However, when I pressed him to clarify points I still got back the same level of detail—with assurances that he knew what he was doing and that I could trust him. Note to any readers: these statements are obviously more red flags.

While this was my first real interaction employing tradespeople, I have since found that high-level and even hand-written scopes of work are not uncommon. Some of the best work done for me happened this way, although those builders were always happy to discuss and clarify their points and prices. What sets Roberto apart is that on multiple instances he would agree to one thing in person and then later argue that the written document (most of which he didn’t keep a copy of himself) only included partial work and thus he had to charge more.

My favorite example of this is the “Kitchen” bullet point—I took this to mean “work for the kitchen” as one naturally might, particularly since that list included nothing else kitchen-related. Note that at this point we had already discussed and agreed to all kitchen-related work and he had even already increased the price (which I agreed to) due to the supposed complexity of this job. In reference to this bullet point, however, it turned out that Roberto actually meant “this refers only to installation of the kitchen cabinetry and I’ll charge you an extra, undiscussed fee for boxing in the kitchen extractor fan, but I will only reveal this price after I’ve already done the job that I previously agreed to”. In case Roberto reads this at a later date I should point out clearly that the last statement was sarcasm. Pressed for time and already well past my move-in date I did end up paying him extra, but from then on I required everything to be written in excruciating detail.

You can probably see where this is going, but the biggest reason you should not hire Roberto Mulè is that he is untrustworthy.

The final straw was that during his time working for me Roberto took downpayment for a job months before it was to start. This was the “New Staircase” bullet item listed above. Unfortunately, after completing a few smaller, unrelated jobs (the quality of some of which is documented below) Roberto subsequently disappeared with the downpayment.

At that point multiple deadlines from him had come, gone, and been renegotiated. Due to his delays I had already temporarily moved into a hotel once and was then living in an unfinished home while work continued being finished. Meanwhile, the work in question was two weeks past his most recent deadline and he hadn’t even started. As is the case with many stories like this I kept working with Roberto out of expediency and a desire to just be done when I really should have given up on him months previously.

In what follows I will first document Roberto’s poor quality of work and then describe the interesting story of the missing the downpayment, however it is worth reiterating:

Do not hire Roberto Mulè, unless you truly want an untrusthworthy contractor who who will take your money and skip out on the job.

The poor quality of Roberto’s work

If being untrustworthy wasn’t enough, Roberto also produced mediocre work. He was perfectly adequate at anything that didn’t require skill or finesse, but finishing work was beyond him.

One task that Roberto was charged with was to open a non-load-bearing wall between two rooms. He did so and as far as I can tell there are no structural issues with his work (I hope!). However, as with much of his work, finishing was not something he was capable of. After opening the wall a join/seam was necessary between the two surfaces at or near the edge of the wall. At some point, within approximately a month or two of plastering and painting the wall, a crack appeared which quickly spread to the entire wall. Below you can see the crack and the initial point where these surfaces separated as well as a larger photo of the crack filling the entire wall.

Fixing this issue required me to hire a competent plasterer who correctly joined the surfaces and then re-plastered the entire wall to feather it in properly. I would have been better off if Roberto had done nothing since nearly all of his work had to be redone.

Roberto was also hired to install skirting boards throughout the property. Below is a picture showing where bottom edge of one section of the skirting contacts the floor. Since this is an older property in London, the floors are not exactly straight and you can see the huge gaps between the floor and the skirting. Now, Roberto could have scribed the skirting boards, but was for whatever reason not able to. Instead he installed them and just glopped in Polyfilla in one single go so it took a week to fully dry (already past one of the many promised move-in dates). It inevitably just pulled away from the edges.

All of my skirting is like this. This is certainly not the biggest gap, but it might be the worst looking (in person it looks like the skirting is rotten at the bottom or has contracted a weird fungus).

It’s also worth mentioning that Roberto was also responsible for removing the floor boards, doubling up the floor joists to reinforce them, and replacing the boards—at which point this might have been rectifiable.

Roberto also installed an extractor fan in my kitchen and was responsible for boxing in the ductwork. I’ve already mentioned this task with regards to his poor invoicing/scoping techiques. What you can see in the image below is a poorly finished section of that boxing under a small section between a wall and cabinetry (cabinetry that Roberto also installed).

This section was actually not done by Roberto but instead by my partner, entirely because Roberto could not figure out how to attempt it; his proposal was to just leave this section as an open void that “no one would notice”. In other words Roberto’s idea of a completed job is what I can only describe as an unfinished hole.

In order to avoid droning on incessently I won’t detail how the doors of our cabinetry don’t align because they were mounted improperly and subject to torsion. I also won’t detail the instances of tiling work Roberto did that were both crooked. For my front door tiling I (not being a tiler) am not entirely sure what he used as spacers, but it was not terribly pleasant to find the wires he left embedded sticking out of the grout. It was particularly unpleasant to make that discovery with bare feet.

I also won’t get into the fact that nearly every internal door hung by Roberto now gets stuck because he didn’t account for any change in size due to humidity. I also won’t go into the countless gouges he left in my wood flooring (which he installed) because he either couldn’t be bothered to order work properly to not cause damage, or because he just didn’t care.

In many of these instances the problem was really that I have no idea at what point Roberto’s limited competence ends and instead he’s just full of hot air.

Do not hire Roberto Mulè because his work is mediocre at best.

As a postscript to this section it is worth pointing out that in well over half the work I’m describing the job itself was physically performed by workers hired by Roberto rather than by Roberto himself. Nearly all of these workers were lovely, hard-working people who were tossed in to do a job that they had no experience of. Those few, skilled laborers that worked on my house early on in this process inevitably had their own arguments with Roberto and were never seen from again, thus contributing to the worsening quality as time went on.

Ultimately this does make me question if I mostly hired Roberto hang around and smoke outside my house. At least he stopped smoking inside my house—and for that I only had to ask him two or three times.

Financial shenanigans

To add insult to injury, when I was finally able to get ahold of Roberto following his disappearance he initially agreed to refund my downpayment. However, shortly thereafter he reneged on this agreement.

Instead Roberto forced me to take him to court in order to attempt repayment. As a result, Roberto Mulè in his capacity as the sole director of YesYNot LTD has a County Court Judgement (CCJ) for debt against him for £3000 (the entirety of the amount claimed) which has been due since May 10, 2023 and currently remains unpaid.

Interestingly, this claim against YesYNot LTD was issued on June 24, 2022 and precisely 5 days later on June 29, 2022 Revolution Built LTD was incorporated. I can only guess at the reasons behind doing so, or even if any assets were transferred to this new company. However, during our working relationship Roberto repeatedly requested payments be made either (a) in cash or (b) to a separate account that he claimed was his mother. Again I can only guess as to why he might want payments to be made somewhere other than his business account.

In the process of of prosecuting this claim Roberto also had the audacity to file a retaliatory counterclaim for an additional £5000. This amount was created completely out of thin air in a blatant attempt to avoid payment of his debts and was used as a threat to avoid going to trial. However, Roberto’s evidence for this claim was gibberish at best and it was dismissed completely in court.

Do not hire Roberto Mulè in light of his shady business practices.

Summary

In summary, the message should now be abundantly clear:

Do not hire Roberto Mulè.