Overpriced, sloppy, extremely unresponsive and slow. We were unimpressed with the service of this company, to say the least.
We were initially very impressed with this company's seeming professionalism and experience, particularly that of its principal. But their actual service did not match their initially slick presentation.
This company strung us along for months only to repeatedly present us with proposals for renovations that were far above the budget that we had provided (in fact almost $300,000 more!), all the while charging us by the hour to repeatedly redesign the plans. Weeks would go by with nothing happening and no updates or tangible progress on our project.
They made errors in the materials that they ordered (e.g. ordering and installing frosted bathroom windows for non-bathroom windows, installing a window where our plans showed no window at all) and then fought with us to avoid taking responsibility for those mistakes. The windows were also a random assortment of horizontally sliding, vertically sliding and casement windows. The casement windows cannot be easily fitted with screens that don't look terrible, so we now have bugs continually entering our house. The installation of the windows was also extremely sloppy (the windows had to be reinstalled at our own expense by our new general contractor, who did a much cleaner and professional job). Our new general contractor indicated to us that the price that we were charged for the windows ($22,500) was far too high.
During demolition and asbestos removal they knocked down a giant part of our backyard fence to gain easier access to our back door and just left the fence laying on the ground so that passersby on the sidewalk could see right into our yard, which was piled high with demolition waste. The company's principal promised us that they would fix the fence (along with our damaged front stairs), but they never did. Again, we had to pay our new contractor to fix this company's sloppy work.
The company's invoicing system was opaque, so it was hard to tell how much subcontractors were charging and how much was being charged as a fee by this company.
The company's principal claimed to have many years of experience and inside knowledge of the City of Vancouver's permitting process and had us pay for a variety of expensive reports that he said were required to obtain the necessary permits. But, upon actually presenting our permit application to the City he got some resistance and recommended to us that we proceed to do the job without permits.
We wasted months (and thousands of dollars) trying to make things work with this company. Ultimately we had to cut bait and hire a new general contractor. Our new contractor did an excellent job within our budget and in fact offered us many options that this company never suggested.
Overall, we had a very negative experience and would recommend avoiding this company.
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- Approximate cost of services:
- $80,000.00
