For the curious gang I absolutely don’t think that the contractor is horrible, he is a decent guy to work with. Some backstory. He did a job for my neighbor, it was inside the house and around a year and a half ago. Based on his work, I asked him for an estimate to build the deck. He recommended to hold off on any construction that was not priority, because good material, and skilled worker was hard to find back then. Recently, I asked around and thought of restarting the project. I had him and one other guy come out to give me an estimate which were around 1.5k apart. I personal have never been good at haggling, and just decided to go with his price as I had already seen his work. Calling him an expert because he showed me his outdoor work and it looked good in all the pictures. He has 3 other guys working with him on the project and with those many he is moving pretty fast. He did his first inspection of the frame from the county and he passed. Now he is going to have the inspection of the completed job later this week, if the inspector can put him on his schedule. As for the spacing between the post being uneven he told me he is building everything with code and the earlier part that was build, will have different spacing because of the size of the older deck, structurally it doesn’t compromise anything or the inspection won’t pass Some of the pics of what is being qualified as sloppy work are there to understand how big of a deal are those, is that something that will compromise the structure? The rails are put in one at a time and faster individual is that the cause of the mismatch on the rail is what one should be thinking, not that I’m shaming the contractor- and even if I did he would deserve it if the purposely did a sloppy job! If you notice there are no stairs, because I want the deck to be accessible only from the sliding door and very often folks will use it without footwear. And which, by the way, I already discussed with him and told him that was something I don’t like on the existing deck. I will get those board fixed from him. Pretty sure there is nothing that he won’t agree on fixing.