The whole point of us hiring a big company was to have a stress-free renovation with minimal management required on our part. Instead, we had 9 months of what can only be described as a nightmare. I would not recommend Home Reno to anyone. There were so many problems that it would take pages and pages to write about, so we will just highlight the most significant.
-Framers took 3 full days to do less than 20 linear feet of framing, that was done so poorly and not to specifications, that it had to be redone. They had access to the whole house and constantly found excuses to be upstairs (heating up food in our microwave, stomping through our living room). Thankfully they were not sent back after we complained to our project manager.
-Electrician poked a hole in the ceiling that went right through our brand new staircase. To date, that stair riser has not been replaced properly. The carpenter cut the riser a half inch too short, and the gap is visible when you are seated and looking at the staircase. -The plumber smoked in our house, and left a cigarette butt on the plastic vapor barrier, leaving a burn hole there. This is not only unprofessional but unsafe.
-The plumber put the plumbing at the wrong height and this caused a lot of stress and havoc when the cement truck arrived – we almost had to cancel this cement delivery – and instead ended up having to pour cement everywhere except for the bathroom – which then had to be done at a later date and causing the cement to settle differently in that area. Project managers rarely visited our home so of course there was no one there to realize the error of the plumbing – thankfully the cement-pouring guys noticed that there was a problem with the plumbing height.
-Later we found out that instead of venting the plumbing outside, the plumber had vented it into our crawl space, causing our finished basement to smell like sewage – we had plenty of stress and anxiety worrying about why. Thankfully, we figured out what the problem was and they were able to fix it.
-The framing was not done by the deadline agreed to, causing us to almost lose our deposit on the foam insulation company – and causing us to have to beg the insulators to come back, while the framers worked furiously, literally at the last minute to get it ready in time – they were pulled off another job last minute to quickly finish the framing on the day of insulation, when they knew about the scheduled insulation date for weeks.
-There would be no one showing up to work on our basement for weeks at a time with no excuse or reason why other than a vague response of “trades related issue.” -This shortage of tradespeople would conveniently happen the instant that an additional payment would be made.
-The side of our yard was constantly full of construction garbage and the personal garbage of the contractors (Tim Hortons cups, water bottles, etc.) At the start of the project, they dropped off a storage bin that was SO big that we couldn’t park our car in the driveway, or barely get past it to access the backyard or our recycling bins. We asked for a smaller bin, but it never came – for the remainder of the project. Instead, we had to bother our project manager every time the garbage was overwhelming and he would personally come and remove the garbage himself into his truck.
-The painter was subcontracted by one of the contractors, and showed up with his two kids for them to paint with him. One of them was a teenager; the other was no older than ten. -Our basement looks great, but this is only as a result of us continuously fighting and pushing for what should be standard operating procedure – someone showing up daily, or at least trying to, and someone doing quality work as per what the company promised. Every week it was a battle to get people to show up and every week, there was a quality issue that needed to be addressed. It got to the point where we had no choice but to withhold payment unless someone showed, and arrange for a daily payment situation to ensure that someone would actually show up. We even got to the point where we let some quality issues slide because we just wanted to not have to deal with them anymore.
-The owners need to seriously re-assess who they hire to do work for their company and ensure that they have enough qualified and trustworthy tradespeople on hand to do a job in a timely manner before they accept it. Our basement took 9 MONTHS to complete. This is 3x longer than they told us it would. This had nothing to do with the complexity of the project or the house being an old downtown house. It was simply because people didn’t show up to work on a regular basement.
-It seems like this company takes on more work than they have people for. They are eager to contact you when a deposit is due, but not eager to send someone your way to finish a job, and continuously break promises in that regard.
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