Batt & Lear

We recently had a pretty negative experience with Batt + Lear. We hired them to install a bathroom and some walls in our basement. Our contract indicated that the work would take 60 days. I understand that projects often take longer than originally projected but it ended up taking 5 months for them to complete this rather simple project. Every time we asked when the work would be completed, Batt + Lear told us that they were a couple weeks away from being done. That went on for months. Not only did the work take way too long, at many points along the way it was of poor quality. My husband spent countless hours documenting the bad work, emailing, and trying to communicate with the business owner about the quality of the work. The owner failed to address these concerns or justified the bad work by pointing to other parts of our 100+ year old house and saying that his crew's work wasn't as bad as the preexisting conditions in the house. When, after months of trying to get Batt + Lear to fix their work, we threw a fit. That finally got their attention and they fixed the work, but after all of the trouble we went through, they offered us no discount or any type of compensation. Batt + Lear isn't cheap but we hired them because we thought we wouldn't have to put in a lot of effort to make sure that they were doing timely, quality work. We did not get what we paid for.

Everybody we worked with was delightful?from B+L employees to the subcontractors they hired for the energy efficiency work. They were all really friendly, nice people who performed high quality, exceptional work. In fact, the best thing we can say about working with B+L is that they created a kitchen design exactly how we envisioned, and they did it with a sustainability ethic that was extremely important to us. They were not the cheapest bid we received and we knew that when we started. But we had a big project and we needed it to be done well. B+L were upfront with the costs, organized and accurate with the budget, and extremely helpful when it came to securing financing. What tipped the balance was that of the contractors we interviewed, only B+L really listed to us and helped design the kitchen we wanted. Others tried to cram their design ideas down our throats, and weren?t willing to really be creative about with our small space.

The most disappointing part of our dealings with Batt & Lear were responsiveness, communication, and price. When we initially interviewed Batt & Lear one of our questions included our budget parameters. Their response to this question indicated that they could do what we wanted within that budget. We were sorely disappointed. We hired Batt & Lear near the beginning of June, 2013. After many miscommunications, long lags in responding to our emails, and disappointments in costs for the designs we ended our relationship with Batt & Lear in mid October of 2013. We had hoped to have started the build phase of the project by then. Our initial disappointment with Batt & Lear was responsiveness to our emails. The time between sending them an email and responding was long. Then we noticed miscommunication within their own company. We had discussed the option of tearing down the house or remodeling at the very beginning. We were told by the principal of the company that renovating would be the same cost as tearing down and starting over. Based on this information we went forward with having them design a house that would be renovated. The principal of the company brought in a project manager to look at the house two months later. The project manager asked us why we weren't tearing the house down after inspecting it because of the amount of work that was needed to renovate. Needless to say our mouths dropped. The project manager said that he and the principal disagreed a lot about whether to renovate or start over. It didn't make us feel better. At a meeting that we thought was supposed to be fit and finish selection, they told us that they had realized the day before the design was way over budget and we needed to cut back. Again our mouths dropped. We didn't know what to do. We told them we couldn't afford the design and they needed to go back to the drawing board. They took some of the blame and told us they would give us a break on the amount they charged us. We decided to go forward since we had so much time and money already invested. They finally submitted a design that did not include all the changes we had requested and a budget that was considerably higher than what we could afford. In that budget were top of the line items we had not requested and had not been consulted about. When we questioned them about this we were told that they could change whatever we wanted. Of course, it would continue to cost us $85.00 an hour to do all this. We called other builders, sub-contractors, etc. to get pricing on a number of the items. All came in lower or we could find less expensive alternatives than what Batt & Lear wanted to charge. In the meantime, we also had hired them to install heat pumps in the house as we had no heat. This dragged on and on and on with delay after delay and a new install date postponed time after time. We finally decided to sever our relationship with them and move on. This was the most frustrating part of our dealings with them as they insisted the problems were all our fault and they would not give us any break on the costs. They kept insisting that we were the ones who couldn't decide on a design. We pointed out that we had no idea how much their designs cost and assumed that they were within the budget constraints we had provided them. We told them we could not afford to continue to pay $85.00 an hour for designs and budgets that were not what we requested. We hired another company to install the heat pump and had no problems with communication, responsiveness, or price. The cost was cheaper than what Batt & Lear quoted us. We are in the process of hiring another designer to redo the plans so that we can afford to renovate our house within our budget. Our experience with Batt & Lear is "buyer beware." Our impression of the way they work is to design what they think would be ideal without concern for cost and then charge the client for the redesigns. They also had difficulty timely communications. Their lack of communication to us and with their own employees us needs a lot of improvement.

We wanted to make some energy efficiency improvements to our recently purchased (2010) house. The house was built in 1937. We went through the Community Power Works (CPW) program which meant we had to use one of their approved contractors. We got bids from two of those contractors. Batt + Lear was the higher of the bids but due to good reviews on Angie's List and good words from the Energy Auditor we went with them. Overall, the results were good. To maximize CPW rebates we needed to improve our homes energy efficiency by 30 percent and, by Batt + Lear's estimates, the improvements we chose would improve it by 53 percent. However, we have no real way of measuring that and it hasn't gotten cold enough yet to see the difference in our power bill. But the house has been more comfortable and temperature stable since the improvements. I do have some complaints though: The job took much longer than it should have; it began in late April and didn't finish until mid October. When we called them out on the slow progress they complained about how busy they'd gotten, due to the CPW involvement. In this economy I wouldn't think that is something to complain about, especially since they barely did any of the work themselves; they jobbed virtually everything out to sub-contractors. During the bid process we were qouted a price for a custom made door between our kitchen and utility room. We asked for an adjusted bid not including a couple elements in the first bid. A couple weeks after the original bid we asked to put the custom door back in to the job; we were told they couldn't do the door for the price they'd quoted a couple weeks prior. The price of the door almost doubled, so we said no.

They have come back to refinish some cabinets we spilled some grease on. They are really excellent for follow-up. Their honesty, integrity, and efficiency keeps me coming back. When they say they'll be there, they're here. When they say a bid, they stick to it. They keep their word.