OAKWOOD HOMES

Worst mistake ever for using Oakwood Homes to build our dream home. We add this review with our opinions and true facts and we recognize that some of it was clearly the fault of the manufacturer, which we tried to distinguish below. First, there were delays. We were told 2 weeks for actual production, then 6 weeks. They failed to mention it would take almost another two months to get the plans finalized. These are the actual dates: In March 2016 we signed the agreement to proceed – it took Schult 2 months until early May to get all of our plans done. They said they could do some custom changes but apparently not at a quick pace. Then it took until AUGUST 22, 2016 for Schult to schedule and finish the house (do the math on the timeline). Had we known this, stickbuilt was a better choice – but it gets worse…. Now the quality and shoddy work - which is all Schult: no window or door headers; uneven walls, corners not meeting, leaving vinyl tile underneath the carpet when transitioning from room to room; they didn’t even build the stove hood at the proper height to meet code; they couldn’t measure 30” for the stove space and got it wrong; they slopped paint primer on the walls so bad that almost every wall had ripples in them which paint did not hide; and the worst is that almost every single kitchen counter was not level/built right. Our external granite team told us it was pretty bad and they would not even measure until a solution was made. It took months for this to happen. Now about Oakwood’s skills as construction mgmt…we felt they took on way too much work. They only appeared to have one superintendent for all their activity – we had their contractors here without any supervision – a lot of work had to be redone because it was wrong or not up to Code and I’m sure we probably paid for it in the end. Then we had the “no shows” and missed appointments. It took from Aug to Oct to finish building the garage and put roof on it – but not before we got hit with Hurricane Matthew which did damage to our otherwise dry crawl space. They took too long to finish repairs – by our “close date” of January 2017 we still had just about 100 Punchlist items still needing attention. Our garage’s window frame came apart because the contractor missed all three nails to the stud (the top part of the frame came crashing down and did considerable damage); The Punchlist items were finally completed in AUGUST 2017, after many phone calls and unanswered emails. Do that math and you will see that it took them a YEAR to finish the job. Other misc notes: they released our escrow and took the balance of funds even though some of the original contract work had not yet been completed (which then means they paid their subs for work not performed yet and then had difficulty getting them back to finish the job); We felt Oakwood’s Service Coordinator was the most incompetent person in the entire process – we could write a book about her; they didn’t track construction changes in the field with change orders so in the end we actually had a refund due us – but until they could sort out the accounting, they wouldn’t release our keys. It then took them another 4 weeks to figure that out. Unbelievable to us, Oakwood would not give us the refund until we signed a Release Statement with a clause relieving them of all “unknown” claims.” So, they held our refund hostage for a while because we wouldn’t sign it. After sending a letter from our lawyer, we arranged a resolution for our full refund without signing away all rights. Beware, they also tried to charge us sales tax on top of the subcontractor work – this is illegal in Virginia – it should have already been buried in the subcontractor invoices. Finally, Oakwood would not share any of the subcontractor invoices with us so for instance when the foundation work came in at $2500 above budget, we couldn’t see the invoice to understand why the difference.

We are very happy with the results, as well as the way in which this project was carried out. There was good communication, and there were very few complications. It took less than five months to complete, and all problems were minor. They were repaired right a way, and we were left with the perfect house for us. We would recommend Oakwood to anyone.