Greg Wike Construction

This job was a major renovation of a home that had been occupied by its previous owner for more than 50 years. It needed some updating as well as some significant "tweaks" to make it more accessible for a mobility-impaired person. The house was vacant during the time the work was performed, over a period of a little more than two months. The remodeling contractor was recommended to me by an acquaintance who heard I was looking for a local contractor; she knew him from her church and vouched for his skills and reliability. Before I met with the contractor the first time, I had given a lot of thought to what tasks needed to be done at the house, and about other items that were negotiable depending on the cost. I was impressed that at our first meeting, the contractor spent nearly two hours in the house with me, carefully going through my list and discussing my ideas and alternatives with me in detail. He also cited a lot of experience with renovations involving accessibility issues, from numerous remodeling jobs he had done for years when he lived in Oregon. From that discussion, we agreed on a scope of work that would fit my budget. His estimate and contract provided a clearly written, detailed description of the work to be done, which helped both him and me to keep up with the tasks in the long weeks ahead. I also visited a house where his work crew was in the middle of another full-scale remodel and saw first-hand that they were capable and did quality work. I was out of town during much of the renovation, but I checked in every week or so and observed that overall the work progressed steadily and the workers cleaned up after themselves each day. The only real difficulty was that for two reasons, the work ended up getting almost a month behind schedule compared to our initial estimate. First, when removing the bathtub to install a walk-in shower, they found that the ancient bathtub drain pipe was badly clogged - though the other bathroom drains were still working fine. We lost several weeks while they waited for me to file a claim with my homeowner's insurance and struggle (with only a bit of success) with the paperwork to get compensation for the plumbing repair. After that battle was over, the remodeling crew quickly did a good job of digging out (literally, several feet of dirt) the old iron drain pipe in the bathroom subfloor and replacing it with new plastic pipe. Second, after removing the carpet throughout the house, they found that they also had to remove the original asphalt/asbestos vinyl floor tiles and the original adhesive in order to lay the ceramic floor tiles. This chore involved getting rid of the old adhesive using a heavy-duty grinder. The contractor had flagged this as a potential problem during our first discussion, though it wasn't included in the original estimate but was noted as a follow-on task that we subsequently added to the work. It took them many tedious days of grinding to remove the adhesive, and this unfortunately conflicted with the contractor's scheduling for his workers at other jobs and led to a longer delay in finishing the work on my house. And that in turn meant that our planned date to move into the house arrived well before all the remodeling work was finished -- so, for about a week, we lived among mounds of unpacked moving boxes in the middle of rooms while a pair of workers finished painting the walls, installing trim, and putting in the new windows. Despite this less-than-ideal situation, we found that the workers were pleasant, low-key, and professional people. We were as much in their way as vice versa but we all "got through it" together without tension. At the very end, in the rush to finish there were several items that the contractor overlooked in the scramble to be done and out of there, but that's where the detailed list in the contract again came in handy, and the contractor himself came, with an apology, to finish the last of the work one day. And besides that, he gave me a much-appreciated freebie lesson in how to prune the former owner's rosebushes in the front yard to keep them blooming. Overall, I was completely satisfied with the quality of the work on this project, the amount I was charged, the integrity of the workers and their boss, and with the experience in general. It was unfortunate that things ran behind schedule, but not the end of the world. This is a company of soft-spoken, competent people who do good, honest work -- and the house simply looks great.