Morrison Homes

Overall experience has been fairly negative but the house is still standing after 3 years...so that's something right? No idea how they claim they're the #1 homebuilder for 11 years in a row, I definitely did not fill out their surveys with good comments.
Starting from the buying experience, we visited several Morrison homes to check out the build quality as well as the different layouts. Chatted with all the difference sales people. When we finally settled on the plan we wanted everything appeared to change. Before we could add rooms, change rooms to our liking. But once we started to go through the layout we were met with lots of resistance on what the plan would look like if the room was changed a bit, the original sales person would say they don't do that. So we just went to another
**Shopping and buying process**
Morrison sales person and they made the changes with no problems...so why couldn't the original person do this? In the end the changed layout didn't work for us so we just stuck with the original but it's nice to know that it wouldn't work. It really felt like the sales person we dealt with didn't know anything about the house we were building. We asked to put in a pocket door to the bathroom because we didn't want to just leave the bathroom open to the master bedroom. This was met with a lot of resistance as well saying that there's no room for it. After we measured the wall and confirmed there was room. The next objection was that the towel holder would get in the way of the door. After showing them pictures of our current place with the same setup, he finally added the door.

**Referal program**
We also referred 2 people who also purchased Morrison homes using the Morrison referral program. Morrison declined both people after our friends asked several times about the referral saying that it was too late.

**Building process**
We also asked several times about the furnace situation. Since we had upgraded some of the rooms in the house, it brought the total square footage of the house over 2400 sq ft. According to Morrison's specs anything between 2400-2600 sq ft will get a 2 stage furnace so we can control the heating on the main floor and second floor independently. We had asked if we would still get this at the very beginning of the building stage before we signed any papers and the answer was "yes". 2 months in the building stage, the sales person sends us a form to sign to decline the 2 stage furnace but we told them that we wanted it since that's what we agreed upon the initial signing. Again much resistance on their part until Morrison said they would give it to us as a gesture of good will....not really sure how this is a good will gesture since it was agreed on from the beginning.
There doesn't appear to be any planning of the heating ducts whatsoever. It almost seems like they just try to meet the minimum requirements of having a heating duct in every room instead of actually calculating if there is enough heat flow to keep the room warm. I say they guess because during the setup process, there was a heat duct going up from the basement to the second floor that went up the corner of the mud room by the garage. It wasn't even hidden in the walls. Later on it got moved behind the wall but you can still see the cut outs in the support beams. Even worse, the same duct makes a complete U turn about 1 meter long to back track up one of the walls on the main floor. When we asked about this, the Morrison rep said that there will be too much flow anyways so there's no point in correcting it. There are other cut outs in the supports in the basement else where for the heating ducts.

**sales center**
The sales center people were awesome. Very friendly, very patient, explained everything very well. Prices of upgrades are ridiculous tho and pretty much everything is an upgrade. But we enjoyed our experience with the sales team. They did a great job of meeting whatever our needs were. We did get dinged when we purchased a water softener system from the appliance store. Morrison charged us extra to set up the line which the appliance store didn't even use. Morrison also charged us by adding another power outlet for the water softening system which again the system did not require. I think there needs to be more communication between Morrison and their contractors...or maybe they just want to get as much money out of their customers as possible.

**post support**
They fixed all the small easy problems. Chipped paint job, squeaky doors, missaligned doors. Couple of dents in the hardwood, siding replacement. Anything that would have required more work they pretty much ignored our request or made an excuse that's just how it is. Starting with the sidewalk from the garage to the front door. Morrison did not want to grade the ground before pouring the cement. This left a step down from driveway to the sidewalk going to the front door then having to step up again. The step down was also slanted towards the house leaving a pool of water which turned to ice during the winter. We asked to have the step removed so visitors didn't have to step down then back up. Morrison told us that's not possible because of the height of the house. We ended up fixing this ourselves and ouring over their concrete. Morrison did say they would fix the water pooling issue but after 2 years they never did come back. The garage concrete was also pooling to one of the corners by the door. When we asked about this, Morrison told us since it's not pooling towards the house it's not their problem. The problem is the pooling was so serious during winter that it would freeze and create a large icy mess around the garage door which is hazardous for people walking in and out of the garage to get a shovel to shovel the driveway. Again we fixed this on our own by just adding some overlay to slant the water away from the corner. Our front drive way is also a huge mess of dents from the winter season. There are chips all over the place and it's not slopped properly causing a huge ice sheet during the winter. Morrison tells us that if it's not over 10%, they won't fix it. This issue still remains until we find a suitable solution.

I personally will never recommend Morrison to any of my friends. In fact I go out of my way to tell my friends to not go with Morrison. We would never build with them again either.