Rob, his brother Dave, his son-in-law George, and helper Vishnu spent a good portion of the summer of 2011 working on our house. We found Rob on homestars and were pretty much at the end of our rope as we'd spent the previous three springs/summers trying to find the right person to do a full restoration job on the front of our neglected 1912 house in Roncey Village. What we needed was all original wood soffits, fascia, and trim removed and replaced like for like, our enclosed porch rebuilt, and everything painted. Writing this now makes it sound simple. But this is fussy, dirty, and sometimes tricky restoration work. You never see this kind of project on HGTV. Most of the people we spoke to previously, some who came highly recommended or who had high homestars ratings, did not even respond with estimates they were so leery of our project. Others provided estimates that were so superficial or had such a high price tag, it was apparent they didn't really want to take the work on either. One homestars-10-rated guy referred to it as "a can of worms". Rob did not appear to be afraid of the job, and while his approach to estimating was a little less detailed than we would typically consider ideal, he appeared to understand straightaway that we were restoration nerds who bought an old house and didn't have any interest in changing the look of it, who were doing a lot of the restoration work ourselves, and who just wanted to make the front of our house look like it hadn't been neglected for 100 years. His years of experience, some of it restoring churches, gave us confidence that he was the guy, possibly the only guy, who could deliver what we needed, and who was willing to do so. The crazy weather this summer turned a 6 week project into 3 months, and there were, as there always are, a few bumps on the way. The replacement porch panels were late and not to spec (Rob played bad cop for us with the supplier there), our porch timbers were all rotten once we uncovered them (as were mercifully few soffit timbers), and we had some trouble finding an eavestrough installer (after some false starts, Rob found one for us). Rob filled in a bit of this slack time doing smaller projects for other people on the street. Interestingly, the visibility of our project seemed to make the street come alive with exterior renovation work to an extent we hadn't witnessed in previous years, even in 2009 (the rebate year). It is our sincere hope that we haven't singlehandedly turned Rob off doing restoration projects, because for people like us, he may be the only person left within miles of Toronto who can both do this kind of work properly and is willing to. We are not going to be the ones to spoil Rob's perfect record, but the 10 we've given him doesn't imply that Rob is perfect. Nobody is. But we can now look at our ugly duckling of a house with pride, because it's finally been restored to the modest grandeur it once had, and more. Our neighbours, some of whom we've never spoken to before, have noticed. We also hope it will inspire more of them to choose proper restoration over slapdash repair, because the difference can be profound. Pros: carpentry work solid, honoured the estimates, showed up with regularity (although the Barrie commute can be an issue), handled tricky things well (e.g., doors, capitals, moulding, rafter-tails, dormers), showed a genuine interest in helping us make good choices. Cons: sometimes dug in his heels a bit when we were critical or disagreed with him, probably will never again agree to paint (sorry everyone).
- Approximate cost of services:
- $42,000.00