Houston Honey-Do

We were trying to find a good handyman to help out my friend’s mom at her house in Sugar Land, so since we’re not local we looked on Unilocal.
Although usually we wouldn’t contact a company with less than 10 reviews (this company had only 1) from clearly legitimate reviewers (we’re always on the lookout for over-​enthusiastic friends and family types of reviews), we decided to take a chance. We were hoping to find someone reasonable, kind and cool to help out my friend’s parents. This company was less than 5 miles away from her parents.
Here’s what happened:
Tuesday: Left voicemail. No response. Sent text. No response to that either
Wednesday: No response
Thursday: Left voicemail. No response. Sent another text saying we’re following up. Got a text back saying he’s too busy to call but can we explain what we need over text. We try to do that, typing out a long text that we would have preferred to be a call. No response.
Friday. Got a text saying «please review our terms of service.» with a link to their web page. And then «Have a great weekend.» (so I guess that means he had no intent of coming out that weekend for an estimate).
Before even agreeing to come out for an estimate (or even returning our calls to understand what the situation was), we were told we had to read their «terms of service» and that «quotes take time, and travel, so before investing either, I prefer to share this info before committing to a review and so you can know how we work before doing so you can see if it aligns with your expectations. We don’t want to waste your time or ours.» Wow, we thought. This guy lives about 3 – 5 miles away. Literally almost no travel time needed.
For a company that bills itself as a handyman service (which to us means friendly, flexible, understanding!), we were shocked to see a page that ran over the length of our screen (see attached photo). We were also surprised to see the following:
«CANCELLATIONS
If work is scheduled, cancellations require 24 hours notice; if notice is not given, you will be invoiced for minimum of a half day [$ 300].»
Wow. Imagine if something came up — that would be $ 300! A full day for these guys is $ 600? We don’t know a single handyman who charges $ 600 a day!
We’re going to go with our gut here. We’re always enthusiastic about working with generous, warm, friendly people who would give us as much understanding about working together — and this means giving each other the benefit of the doubt. After extending this person that benefit of the doubt — over all of last week, when we should have been spending our time contacting other companies — we’ve decided this is simply not going to work out. Because we can’t predict everything that would happen on a job, it’s important to us that the people we work with are folks who would be as willing to take a chance on us as we would on them.

I’m new to Houston, and new to home-​ownership, and I have to admit: I was overwhelmed pretty quickly. Between the «joys» of moving, settling into a new job, and jumping through hoops to get a home loan, I just didn’t have the time or the tools to try and check things off my growing «to-​do» list.
And trust me, after buying an older house, there were *tons* of things on my ‘to-​do’ list. I really needed to tackle the multitude of little things I thought would make my house more livable, but after putting down a large down payment, I didn’t want to strain my budget in the process. Enter Darren from ‘Houston Honey-​Do’: this man was a lifesaver! In one day, he managed to finish everything I could possible think needed doing in my home. He corrected sticking doors, fixed my desk, hung up curtain rods, installed peg boards, and even put in an programmable thermostat for me. Fast, professional, and very likeable, Darren was a real lifesaver – and best of all, getting his help was actually pretty inexpensive! I can’t recommend Houston Honey-​Do enough.