Jan from Milton in Milton

This is the second new house we've purchased. There are things about each purchase that are better than the other one. The Mattamy house included the following free upgrades that we had to pay for at the other house: main floor 9' ceilings, air conditioner, main level hardwood floors, wooden stairs and railings, granite counters as part of $5000 worth of free upgrades, door between the house and garage, towel bars, light fixtures. The Frendel (made-in Canada) cupboards were so good that we didn't need to upgrade. Even though the berber carpet was an upgrade, it was so thin that the prongs on the metal bar between it and bathrooms, poke into our feet when we walk on it. We should have upgraded twice. The upgraded carpet at out previous house was thick and luxurious. On the other hand, the upgraded cupboards at our first house were terrible, with the colour fading where our hands touched the wood. Same for the stair railing. The tiles in the Mattamy house were laid properly whereas in the other house, the grout on the kitchen tiles cracked as soon as we started walking on them and the actual tiles eventually cracked in front of the sink and patio door. Mattamy Problems: Two of the three towel bars fell off the bathroom walls, one leaving a big hole. These were installed by a Mattamy employee, Shower curtain rod was defective and was replaced but continually falls off the wall. When you touch the walls on the stairwell, you can feel little rough bits of paint. It appears as if it wasn't sanded properly. As for PDI, they used one of their customer service employees to fix the problems, instead of a professional. There were gouges on the garage and front doors. He filled, then sanded them but you could still see lumps after he finished. The sod was laid unbelievably quickly and there were spaces between the roles. When we moved in, we booked Cogeco for the next morning but when they arrived, they told us that because of the cold weather, the cable TV boxes hadn't been put in and said they couldn't even hook us up temporarily because there were no evestroughs to attach the lines onto. The Mattamy rep argued about it, saying he'd never heard of a cable company needing evestroughs to attach lines too. We had to wait about 2 weeks for Mattamy to install the evestroughs before we were able to have internet access. This was extremely inconvenient because one of us works online. Mattamy was in too much of a rush to move us in. They appear to use their own employees instead of professionals to do things like install towel bars and fix other problems. This is the only time in our lives where we have had towel bars fall off the walls and you have to ask yourself why. When it came to painting the front doors, apparently the Mattamy employee who was supposed to paint them, didn't realize that the doors had to be open, so didn't notify the home owners first. We missed having our door painted for that reason. However, their staff was normally very friendly, the house is lovely in spite of the rough bits of paint here and there and we'd recommend them. We expect that no matter who the builder is there will be things about them that one likes and other things that will disappoint. Both houses were structurally sound but we feel we got a better deal from Mattamy.