mhoye

We got a recommendation from John from a friend he did a much bigger job for, and we're glad we did. He rebuilt our aging, drafty front porch encasement for us, including putting a new window and spray insulation. He did great work - excellent craftsmanship, done on schedule, a clean, safe worksite and good communication, can't ask for more than that - and it's stood up well. I'd be happy to hire him again.

As part of a gut renovation of our basement Canwood Flooring came in to replace our decrepit old floors with laminate and recarpet our stairs. They were recommended to us by our Oborne Contracting, with whom I was also extremely happy, and I have no complaints. Working with them was pretty straightforward - basement floors are basement floors, so there wasn't a lot of going back and forth about materials and cost - but they came in on time and did the job quickly and well, paying attention to detail and not cutting any corners or doing a half-assed job on the parts of the floor that are hard to see like inside closets. So the lines are all straight, the seams line up nicely and it looks good where it meets the wall - there's not much more there I could have asked for. The best part of their work was in recarpeting the stairs, which to be blunt were some crappy old basement stairs that we'd elected not to replace during the renovation. It wasn't a big job, but fellow Canwood sent in took one look at them and said it would be hard to do perfectly, which I totally understood. But I think he's got a better eye for that than I do, because now that it's all done it looks great, hugely better than it did before. All told, I'd use Canwood Flooring again. The estimate was reasonable, the final price was the one agreed on up front, dealing with them was painless and the work was done on time and on budget.

On a friend's recommendation, we decided to hire Oborne Contracting to complete a gut renovation of our basement, gutting right down to the brick foundation and rebuilding it with modern amenities like a working washroom and vapor barrier and stuff. This turned out to be an excellent, excellent decision. It's not enough that the work just be done well, you know? That's to be expected. When you tell your friends how a renovation went, you don't just say "everything is to code, yay." There's a lot of little things that can make the whole experience either completely painless or totally agonizing, depending on how they go. As our job progressed we got to see a lot of attention being paid to details big and small, in ways that we really appreciated. At the end of the day the job site was always clean. All the people we spoke to were courteous and professional, every time. Any questions we had either got answered or got forwarded to somebody who could answer them, and those answers always came back. When they weren't sure what we wanted, they asked; a few small changes were easily done, one or two bigger changes were made by getting a revised estimate and a signing off on it, a process that John Oborne laid out before we began that worked out pretty well. The quality of the work done was great, and we got to see a lot of care being put into things that are now hidden behind the drywall and that we'll likely never see again, which is awesome. But let me tell you, the best part is the stuff that Oborne Contracting _didn't_ do. They did not suddenly stop returning my calls. They didn't stop answering the phone or get halfway into the demolition before disappearing for weeks. They didn't change estimate on me or weasel out on materials or schedules. When I had any problems, I never got told that it wasn't their problem; it just got fixed. So now I have a basement that I'm quite pleased with. I'm ridiculously happy with how the construction went, and considering what was down here before, it's hard to believe it's the same basement. So in a year or so when we decide to renovate our kitchen, we're probably not going to bother calling anyone else.