Design-Rite Construction Inc.

We met Barbara Moss (owner) at the Fair in June 2014. We ordered a swim spa there and knew we would need a contractor for the deck. We made an appointment with her. She came over, very friendly, with a helper to measure the yard. We told her what our vision for the whole yard was and she agreed to give us an estimate for the whole project. We made a follow up appointment to view her bid. But a few days before the appointment my husband had a very serious stroke. He was hospitalized for a month. We had decided however to scale down the plans to just get a deck around the spa so that he could use it for physical therapy. She agreed to come to the hospital to present her bid. We liked the idea and the price and signed a contract with her. We should have noticed a red flag right off the bat, she wrote her contracts all by hand and going back we could not make out much of her handwriting. The first step was pouring a thick foundation for the spa. This was done well in a timely fashion. The spa took about 4 weeks to manufacture. The work would begin in August and she estimated that the deck would be completed in 18 working days from the spa delivery. Well today we made our final payment after the last work was completed this morning. Today is February 5, 2015. The list of what went wrong is endless. Workers coming for 3-4 hours a day, that is when they bothered to show up at all. Days and weeks would go by when we neither saw or heard from either Barbara or the workers. Now under normal circumstances, I would not have let it get that far out of hand but my husband's recovery and the difficult turn of events in our lives made me less aware than I should have been. I finally had a conversation with her and told her how upset and angry we were at her and the whole process. She then blamed the guy she had hired to do the work. Yes, she hired the wrong guy. She said he TOLD her he was a deck expert. Apparently she neither checked his references or his work because virtually nothing was getting done and the little that was done was sub par. The fault was still with her because she never bothered to show up and check the work. She would have known the job has fallen off the rails WEEKS before she figured it out had she bothered to come by. There was one change that had to be made to the plan to accommodate the spa lid and she made a big deal out of that. She did a change order and we paid additional funds. If the problem had been noticed say a week after construction started, no big deal, we will work with it. But by the time they noticed it was wrong we were sick with frustration and anger. She FINALLY fired the deck guy and brought in a master carpenter. This was November or so. He did most of the work framing in the stairs (the most difficult part) in about 2 days. He worked all day and his work was really lovely. Then Barbara had the nerve to say that she would need additional money because master carpenters are VERY expensive. We told her NO WAY and reminded her we had a contract and she had better figure it out. So she hired another carpenter and helper. According to her, not as expensive but still good. Well that guy was here a couple of days. When we finally got to see our deck with all the construction debris gone we were beyond appalled. The stairs and the small landing on top to the spa entrance was beautiful. But the actual deck below is a hot mess. The footings were not placed levelly so many of the boards are sticking up above the frame. One corned is so far up you can actually see the corned sticking up without a level. Joints on the corners are not flush and there are gaps all around the perimeter. But by far the worst part was at one place on the deck they ran out of the long boards they were using and butted shorter boards together. They didn't even stagger them! I took her out to show her it looked like the deck had been patched. I wish I could upload pictures, it's disgraceful. She did have someone come out and stagger the boards so it didn't look quite so obvious. But there was nothing that can be done about the rest without tearing the whole thing up and starting over. So we are stuck with it. So all these months and all that money and we have a product we will never be completely happy with. I'm just glad we didn't contract with her for the whole yard as we had originally thought. The final insult to us was that she continuously, even up to the last day, kept telling us that she lost money on the job. According to her, it was because she felt so sorry for my husband she gave us too good a deal. According to us, it's because she wasn't professional enough to screen her subs and check on her jobs. Save yourself the grief we went through and DO NOT get involved with Design Rite Construction!

Very poorly. Never on time. Very slow. Lots of excuses and lacking in responsiveness. Took way to long to install due to workers showing up late in the day and only working for a few hours. Overall, once they finally completed the work, it looked good. However, it was a totally unsatisfactory experience and I would never recommend them to anyone else.

Barbara has done a lot of work for us. We continued to use her because she listens well, has very reasonable prices, does quality work, stands by her work and makes the process as painless as possible.