Ovation Builders LLC

We looked at this builder because they had performed work on a neighbor's house with a similar configuration to our own. We had an initial estimate which was in our ballpark budget - except there appeared to be some discrepancies - for example the decking we wanted was a line item, but there was no line item for the railing (our deck is 5 feet off the ground) which we were told was in the 'general materials quote'. So we moved to a more detailed estimate - which went up 20% and most of that was the new line item for the rail. Still, the price was just in our budget and we decided to move forward. When the existing deck was demolished we 'discovered' that previous owners had used the septic tank as the base for a corner post! The outcome of this was that the screened in porch was no longer viable - not anybody's fault, just a fact of life. We moved forward with a deck only project and a reconfiguration to account for the septic tank. From the very start we had said we wanted to use 'Trex' or similar composite material. Turned out the sub-contractor (Scott Carpentry) hadn't worked with Trex before. They worked it out, but the decking and rail went very slowly as they got familiar with the product. The end result was very pleasing, but the labor charge seemed too high to us and we felt that we were charged for 'learning' time of builder. We felt that the 'supervision' of Ovation was lacking from this respect and they didn't place any time requirements for each stage of the job - which we ended up paying for because we were now on a time and materials because the job had changed. The complete original job was supposed to take 6 - 8 weeks. When the deck was completed in 4 weeks we were charged 80% of the estimated labor cost, of the original job which didn't seem fair - even though Ovation 'reduced' the labor charge by $700 because they thought it was proportionally too high. With the final accounting we had to query items that we thought should have been clearly itemized - material costs that had been line item 'allowances' in the estimate, returns of overages credited, etc. In conclusion, we are very pleased with the end result, would recommend Scott Carpentry - if they had experience with the material requirements of the job - but we would not recommend Ovation as we think they added no value to the project.