Brant Home Repair & Remodeling

He way overcharged me and I would not be going with him again. He had quoted us for $1,100 and ended up charging us $1,700. So, I would not be using him again. He used some poor quality wood and it is already starting to go bad.

Mr. Brant had to reschedule our first appointment, but he was prompt for the second appointment and he provided a quote. He came the next day to do the work. He completed the work on time and cleaned up the area. He did a very nice job and we were pleased.

Somehow we had some exterior rainwater splash up under the outside panels which soaked the wall next to our back door. We hired Brant Home Repair and Remodeling to do the repair work since Lee (owner) did a good job installing our solar attic fan. The price we paid did not include paint which was provided to us by our builder after initial construction. The builder supplied paint was used. Brant Home Repair and Remodeling did not obtain new matching paint. We also provided the baseboard wall trim and door trim, also remaining from initial construction. Only the drywall was provided by Brant. The job ended up as a two-day fix since the drywall had to cure and dry before adding texture and painting. The end job was very good. We were very impressed with the work and it looks really nice. We did not obtain any other estimates, and I'm not sure $350 is a great deal for the repair or not.

This was a job well done. Lee (the owner) came by mid-morning on April 16th and was able to install the solar panel powered fan unit by removing the roofing tiles, cutting into the roof and then mounting the fan assembly. The total time was about 2-3 hours which included hooking things up in the attic space. The only problem with the electric hookup was that things apparently had to be connected in a certain order. Not sure if the instructions were read on this, and I didn't even realize that this had to be done until the fan stopped working about 2 weeks after installation. The technical support at US Sunlight knew exactly what the problem was and walked me through the steps to connect it correctly. They said that incorrect connection order was one of their most common and frequent support request issues. That's the only issue I take with the job done, and I guess as the saying goes... read the flippin' instructions (RTFI). Not to make a plug on the solar fan itself, but the fan works great for pulling hot air out of the attic, if anyone is interested.

We had Brant Home Repair and Remodeling give us an estimate on expanding our 10'x10' concrete patio in May 2011. The bid was to extend the patio slab area with decking, and additional 375 square feet. The original estimate we received was about $1450 (or thereabouts). I received a phone call Lee (owner) stating that they would do the work for $1175 if I would have the decking built during the week of 23-27 May "to fill their schedule", so of course I agreed. This job was for only the framing and decking boards, and did NOT include any railing or other items. I had wanted to use screws instead of nails on the decking boards but I was told that doing so would increase the cost. I declined and said that I would go ahead and screw the boards down myself to keep the cost the same. I did insist that screws be used in the frames below the boards, so this was done by the contractors. In addition, I wanted to use 2x8's instead of 2x6's that they suggested. I remembered seeing something from the city requiring 2x8's. It was agreed that most of the framing except that which was directly against the concrete slab would be 2x8's. I was told by Lee that digging that deeply next to the slab might compromise the foundation of the slab. Well, as anyone knows, the temperatures and weather down here in San Antonio, TX, has been extremely hot and dry since April, so the workers were only able to work on the deck a few hours a day. There were two guys working (one is the owner, Lee), but most of the work was done by the other guy (Ricky) who was here most of the time. Lee was here maybe 1-2 hours each day except the first day (he was there 4-5hrs). They had to quit early each day since the temperature rose to over 100 degrees by about noon. When the job was completed, I was told that the decking materials cost them well over $900 and that the owner (Lee) was supposed to be making over $350 (or somewhere thereabouts) each day just for himself, so he had severely "underbid" the job. The price for the completed deck (less securing the decking boards) was now $1750. I was not happy at all with this, but paid anyway. I probably should not have done so. Our observation on this matter is that Lee was likely doing other jobs for most of the day while Ricky was left doing the work here. I don't believe that I should be paying Lee's nearly full daily salary when he was not here doing the work, but instead out doing other jobs and being paid by other customers. I priced the materials at Lowes just to see if the costs panned out to what Lee stated. I figure that since I am a retired veteran and receive a 10% discount at Lowes, as a construction company, they would surely get some sort of discount on their materials. I did not include any discount when I figured up the approximate material costs following. Here is what I figured for materials (liberally with additional pieces), totalling $818.45 without ANY DISCOUNTS. $47.76 8 - 4x4x8 posts, treated (6 visible, 2 hidden for support under-deck) $103.86 18 - 2x6x10 Prime treated lumber (16 boards, 2ft spacking, plus 2 extra) $62.79 7 - 2x8x10 Prime treated lumber (for perimeter of deck frame) $358.20 60 - 1x6x10 Appearance grade treated boards (55 boards, plus 5 extra) $42.88 16 - Quikrete 40# concrete mix, (2 bags per post) $55.48 2500 - smooth shank-bite framing nails (of which possibly 300-500 were used, so should be closer to $10) $27.48 1 - 5# box 3-1/2" x 10 exterior screws (lightly used on base since mostly nails were used) $62.38 Tax --------- Total $818.45 I had asked that since we were building over a grassy area of our back yard, would we need to put anything down below the decking so that grass would not come through. I was told that the decking boards would be so close together that they had not seen any possibility of grass coming through the deck. Boy, were they wrong! We had grass growing through the boards within 2-3 days. Funny thing about grass and weeds... they always seem to find their way to sunlight. This was a major fiasco since we had already secured ALL the boards ourselves with screws already. Pulling all the decking up in order to put material underneath to prevent grass from coming up created a mess and it really chewed up our boards pretty badly taking out the screws. We were not happy campers since we were the ones now working in the over 100 degree heat, doing the same work twice to fix this issue. Since the contractor had lightly used fairly light-duty screws in the framing beneath, we subsequently bought large 4 1/2" heavy-duty screws to secure the frame. We noticed that after only 2 weeks that the framing nails had already started to loosen. It's a darned good thing we used the larger heavy screws to prevent any further loosening. I had called Lee about 2 weeks after the job was done and left a message that I was not particularly happy with what had happened. I did not hear back from him for about 4-5 days. When he returned my call, it was WELL AFTER WE HAD ACTUALLY PERFORMED THE WORK to fix the issue. When he called, he said he would come over and fix it, but we told him that we had already done so. He then offered a discount to whatever our "next contracted work" would be.