Design & Builder Home Improvement Inc

Our detached garage was built by the previous owner of the house as a DIY hack job. Among the many problems with it was a poorly-applied shingle roof, which was not appropriate for the shallow pitch of the roof. Over time, water had started to penetrate the shingles and started to rot out the plywood underneath. It literally rained inside the garage when it rained outside. I made quite a few phone calls to general contractors and roofing specialists to repair this mess. A few contractors simply never returned my calls, and one who showed up and promised an estimate never bothered to actually deliver one. Christian, however, promptly returned my calls and came over right away to take a look. He delivered an estimate exactly when he said he would. In addition to the roof replacement, I asked him to give me an estimate for some cosmetic repairs, such as covering a bare masonry wall and replacing some rotted wooden trim around the garage door. Another contractor finally came in with a lower estimate right after I had given Christian the go-ahead to start work, but I felt more comfortable with Christian's higher estimate because he had been much more responsive from the start. The work lasted about 1 week in total, with a day lost due to rain. Christian and his assistants arrived on time each morning, and left the work site clean and tidy at the end of each day. The new rubber membrane roof was applied by the end of the second day, and the rest of the week was spent on trim work. I leak-tested the roof after it was applied and found no evidence of any defects. What I was most impressed with was how well the trim work on the back wall turned out. We had a bare masonry block wall with mismatched blocks, which Christian was able to cover up with a couple of coats of cement stucco. The before/after difference is really remarkable. My overall experience with Christian and his company was positive. If I was re-roofing my house (as opposed to a detached garage), I would probably have hired a roofing specialist who does nothing but roofing day in and day out. However, given that the garage was already in pretty poor shape, and the risk of it developing leaks within a few years was within my range of tolerance, I felt comfortable hiring a general contractor to do the work.

Since we have a 100yr old house, we had a few setbacks the first couple of days. We discovered mold and that our wood floors were too damaged to be repaired. The contractor started mentioning change orders right away and there was a not-fun conversation about how we wanted the CO numbers broken down into time and materials. We also were dissappointed that the Handymen were doing most of the plumbing work and we actually ended up removing this work from their contract and hiring a separate plumber. We did not want our plumbing work done by handymen since we have had problems in the past. Once these wrinkles got smoothed out, things progressed better. Christian's team worked extremely hard, often here until 6-7pm at night and they worked Saturdays too. They handled the challenges fairly well and were willing to compromise on the price. The kitchen does look great and we are happy with it. There are a few details that I think a more experienced kitchen contractor would have done differently including: leaving 1" of wood cabinet fill on the wall that have baseboards (when we open our cabinet doors the bottom of it hits the baseboard), some areas where they used filler wood do not match as closely to our cabinets as I would of liked, and they filled in the nail holes of the shoe moulding with white wood putty instead of a tinted putty that would match better (looks like white polka dots). They also left our dishwasher outside on our patio some nights with plastic over it when it started to rain. There are also a couple of knicks in our range that weren't there before this renovation. With all that said, they did work very hard and our kitchen is small so they were often very cramped for space. I have to mention that English was a second language for this contractor, so there were many typos and things in his proposal but he understood everything we said verbally and via email.