CLARK CONSTRUCTION

When we bought our home in early summer we wanted to remodel before moving in. I contacted several contractors in the area including Clark Construction. The only contractor to return my phone call was Ross at Clark Construction. Not only did they make time to meet with us but they guaranteed our project deadline. The responsiveness was impressive. Clark Construction honored the timeline and estimate. Since then we have hired Clark Construction for additional projects. Simply put, we keep using Clark Construction because of their availability, honesty and attention to detail.

Based on my experience with Clark Construction I wouldn't recommend the firm for a renovation. Gary is an excellent salesman, but his company suffers from the classic oversell/under deliver paradigm. His team simply cannot deliver. Clark Construction charges a premium for the design build service, and we were willing to pay it because we thought we were contracting with a superior company. We planned to leave the house during the build, but after continually seeing mistakes and poor corrective action, we simply could not entrust our home to them without someone being there during the build. Clark missed the mark on many occasions on what most would consider the basics. The foundation for a 3- story addition was poured short, and new doorways were visually out of square. They had to redo the floors twice due to poor sanding technique, to name just a few. Clark charged a premium for any change orders, even if they should have considered the charge in the total contract given the new code acceptance. There came a point in time in our project where we just wanted them out of the house regardless of their ability to deliver good results for the simple reason to stop hearing "We'll make it right". After the ninth or tenth time of hearing "We'll make it right", you have little faith in their ability to execute against the promise given the talent being leveraged. It's my firm belief that the root of all the issues we ran across was due in large part to poor communication and supervision by Gary. Once you are in contract, he is no longer interested. As for his staff, his designer was "no longer with the firm" within weeks of the start of our build, and his project manager was spread too thin and appeared to allow the trades to self manage. If you choose to work with Gary, please go in knowing our experience is not a single instance and apparently in speaking with the very trades he hires, is not out of the norm.

We chose Clark because they provided design services and claimed to be able to make the renovation experience as easy as possible for the homeowner. My husband and I work long hours, and he travels a lot, and I didn't feel I could manage all the design pieces, working just with a contractor. From the very beginning they did not meet my expectations, and I felt pressured to agree to things I was uncomfortable with. We paid $1200 up front for the designs, ostensibly so they could be protected from having invested in the design process and having us use the designs with a different contractor. However, they would not even allow us to take any of the designs home, and all the consultations were done at their offices, so we couldn't even look at the designs in the context of our home where the work would be done. They told us if we wanted to take the designs home, we would have to pay them a 10% deposit on the estimated cost of the whole job. Because my husband works out of town, it was difficult for him to make the design meetings; they don't usually work on weekends and scheduling on Saturdays was inconvenient for them, although we did have our design meetings on Saturdays. The designer, Natasha, was lovely and very accommodating, but she seemed to have little authority and the owner seemed impatient with her (and with us) when he came to the meetings. They gave us a contract with a projected completion date of August 14, which was 9 weeks from the date they prepped our house for the work. When I expressed surprised that it would take 9 weeks to do one bathroom, they said it was a conservative estimate, because they wanted to be sure to make the deadline, and they almost always finish ahead of time. The entire process (which was not completed until September 2, not including items on the "punch list," which were completed later) actually took almost 12 weeks, despite the fact that there were no unexpected problems with the work site. All the delays were attributed to subcontractors having problems. My biggest complaint, however, was that there never seemed to be anyone from Clark actually in charge. Through the entire period, except for days when I actually made an appointment with the person who was supposed to be supervising the site, I never saw their people at my house. When I expressed my concern about this, they told me that the guy who was in charge of our project (who seemed like a very nice person) had too many jobs and they were trying to hire another supervisor. In other words, they could not provide adequate service. I felt like I was managing the work. When one of the subcontractors made a big hole that went through the floor and the ceiling below, no one told me about it; I discovered it myself, and they agreed they must have caused it. (They did eventually fix the hole, at the end of the entire project.) There were what seemed like dozens of different subcontractors showing up at my house (although they never scheduled different work on the same day, so often someone would come for half an hour and that was the end of work for the day). I never knew when they were coming, and sometimes they would ask ME what they were supposed to do. When the insulation people came, they didn't even know which room they were doing, and when they finished, they asked me if there was another room they were supposed to do. As a teacher, I was actually not working a regular schedule for much of the summer, but their contract specified that their work day was from 7AM to 7PM, M-F, so all summer long I had to be up and showered and dressed by 7 AM, with my car moved out of the driveway so I wouldn't be parked in by trucks, even though there was not a single day the entire summer when workers came that early. Many days no one came at all. When I told the Clark people that it was really inconvenient for me to be prepared for contractors from 7AM to 7PM every day when they rarely came, they told me it was to protect the client from having a subcontractor walk in on them unexpectedly. In my experience with other contractors, they tell you when they are coming, and that is how you are not surprised, but they said they couldn't possibly manage all their subcontractors that closely and report to clients when they would come to their houses. The subcontractors seemed to be working with no supervision at all most of the time. They would arrive at my house and let themselves in without knowing the alarm code, and would then frantically make phone calls to find out the code. Sometimes I would come home and find that the front door had been standing open all day, because it was more convenient for them as they carried things into the house. When the tile contractors were cutting the tile (which took weeks, because they only came a few hours at a time, and they weren't able to get the right sized tile, so they had to cut all the pieces), they set up their saw in front of my front door and left it there for days at a time. Although they were supposed to enclose the work area with a zipped plastic "wall," they told us they couldn't do it because we had a cathedral ceiling and it was our responsibility to cover and protect all our furniture and floors (which we tried to do with plastic sheeting). This was an interior master bath, which should have been easy to segregate from the rest of the house, but the construction dust got everywhere, because I had to ask each contractor individually to keep the bedroom door closed, and of course I wasn't always there. The bottom line is that I felt like there was really no consideration for our experience through the entire process. Our bathroom is very pretty, but I would never hire Clark again, and I feel like we paid top dollar for a pretty unpleasant experience.

THE PEOPLE THAT CAME WERE VERY GOOD AND PUNCTUAL. AS FAR AS THE COMPANY ITSELF, I WOULDN'T RATE THEM VERY HIGH FOR PROFESSIONALISM. IT SEEMS LIKE OTHER COMPANIES ARE A LITTLE MORE ORGANIZED THOUGH.

I WAS NOT HAPPY, BECAUSE HE OVER-ORDERED MATERIALS AND DID NOT DO ANYTHING TO GET THEM RETURNED TO THE SUPPLIER. HE OVER-ORDERED A THOUSAND DOLLARS WORTH OF SUPPLIES. WHILE INSTALLING THE HARDWOOD FLOORS HE GOUGED THE WALLS AT LEAST A DOZEN TIMES AND MADE NO ATTEMPT TO REPAIR THEM.

EVERYTHING WAS TERRIBLE. I WOULDN'T RECOMMEND THEM TO ANYONE. THEY CAME LATE AT NIGHT. THEY PICKED THE WRONG COLOR THEN THEY HAD TO RE-SAND IT AND THEY DID THIS AT NIGHT. THEY HAD TO KEEP REDOING IT. I'D HAVE TO REPLACE IT IF I WANTED TO REDO IT AGAIN.