Sunbeach Design Build LLC

Where to even begin... First the good: Phil Greenblatt came highly recommended by our next door neighbors who were very happy with their whole house remodel. Phil's subcontractors were some of the nicest, most trustworthy, and hardest working people I've ever met in residential construction. Especially his Concrete, electrical, plumbing, framing, flooring, siding and tile guys. Just top notch honest hard-working guys. Showed up when scheduled, got the work done, didn't mess around. Just great. We still admire their workmanship. And now the bad: Phil and his "general" construction crew was where the real problems began. These guys handled demo, roofing, drywall, painting, kitchen cabinet install, and all the day-to-day crap. They were over-committed. One guy had his own general contracting business. So phil's work came second on the schedule and it. was. infuriating. They went so far beyond schedule (several months) that they pushed up against a major surgery date I had and THENSOME. getting them to show up for solid day of work was near impossible. getting them out of my hair and providing a safe place to live while I recovered from surgery just didn't happen. hopped up on pain killers returning home from surgery, I tripped up the *incomplete* stairs to our house really hurt myself. Exactly what I was trying to avoid. But I digress. Here's what really happened: We are both architects. We hired Phil to complete our remodel because we don't have enough architecture experience in residential work and probably know just enough to be dangerous. Partnering with a design/build professional made sense because it allowed us to spearhead a design intent and then lean on Phil for some marinated residential industry and construction knowledge to best execute our ideas. He knew this up front. He agreed to this teamwork relationship. we signed a contract defining his role as "project manager" with meeting minutes after each meeting, weekly invoicing and budget tracking, and a defined scope of services and budget estimate. He charged us 20%. TWENTY PERCENT of our budget to provide his highly refined project management and design consultation skills and set our expectations high. The other reason we were willing to pay for a little extra for exceptional construction and project management was because I was recovering from a grueling 6 months of cancer treatment. Not once did we get meeting minutes. and in fact, the lack of communication and tracking of communication caused so many problems contractually, financially, and construction-wise that my husband set aside HOURS and HOURS of his own time compiling his OWN VERY DETAILED meeting minutes and sending it out to Phil after each conversation. After this was so clearly a role that was defined in his project. Furthermore, phil did not provide one assist in sketching or drawing the design even though this is required for the "design" half of a design/build service. We provided the initial drawings and pulled the permit ourselves because we are capable of doing this. But we expected a fluid relationship and drawings as a method of communication or construction or conflict resolution. Instead he kept pushing us to provide sketches. which we did. And then, when issues or stupid and careless construction mistakes happened, we heard one of the following excuses, "if it's not in the drawings, how am I supposed to know you didn't want two heating registers 24 inches away from each other? I didn't know you only wanted 1?" But when we pointed out details that we had so clearly drawn, he didn't brief his subs and they just installed whatever the heck they wanted to however the heck they wanted. i.e., he was only held to the drawings when it was in his favor, when it was clearly a miss on his part, he wasn't bound by the drawings. I once walked into take a look at a new pair of 4x4 posts supporting a 4x12 beam in the kitchen and found that the posts were NOT BEARING on ANY structure below. Just resting on the floor and sub floor that was spanning between two joists. Had it not been for the fact that the flooring was cut back at the point, we would have never caught it. Phil was very embarrassed. they came up with a fix that I thought was acceptable. but I wasn't able to see the final product before they closed everything up, so I would be lying if I said I wasn't still a little nervous about it. And then the invoicing. Phil does everything by hand. his math errors ran wild. If it weren't for me keeping VERY careful financials and tracking every penny and piece of scope on a master excel spreadsheet, we estimate that we would have overpaid him tens of thousands of dollars due to his math errors we kept catching. He would over charge, double charge, add wrong, or not track previous payments. He was very embarrassed that he could not give us the remainder of the contract amount that we owed because HE HAD NO IDEA what we owed, and tried to play it off. I was so frustrated that I had to back check all his work and basically do his job, that I was very reluctant to share my master spreadsheet with him of all the financials. We suspected he was having money problems because his subs indicated that he owed them money as an excuse for not showing up consistently. A day before he left for a european gettaway he asked for $20,000 on the spot with no invoice and no actual justification. He just wanted a "progress payment". I said, "why would we write you a 20K check without an invoice showing what it was that we were actually paying for? at a phase in the project where we are contractually entitled to hold back 5% retainage for work not yet completed?" He couldn't produce what the 5% retainage actually was or let us know what our remainder overall was and just stormed out of our house. We eventually offered up all of our financial records to give him an opportunity to compare with his records, check our work, extend and olive branch, and reconcile his books so that we could all sit down and comb through what the remainder that we owed him was. He couldn't even do that. So in exasperation, we wrote up a completion agreement and deducted the work left to do from what we were able to determine we owed him and presented it as an option to cut him loose. He eagerly signed it, we cut him a check, and we never saw him again. We were left with a mountain of unfinished loose ends and work. Including an incomplete deck railing that almost caused our homeowner's insurance to lapse. but the biggest issue we discovered recently (after letting phil go almost 4 months ago) is that he ONLY had the electrical inspections with the city. but NONE of the OTHER REQUIRED inspections. I logged onto the DPD and there are 6 remaining framing, structural, setback, foundation, insulation, and final inspections required. We were expecting to schedule the final ourselves, but were completely blindsided by this incompetent mistake. We are in the process of negotiating with the DPD to just "Final" our project explaining that we had to basically fire our contractor at the end of the project. Not completing inspections can affect your ability to finance a property, insure a property, and thus sell our house one day. what a mess. And then there was his painter son, Zack Greenblatt, who we stupidly hired who never finished HIS work and then completely dissapeared. But that's for a different review. In summary: Though we are 85% happy with the final product the journey proved to be a very stressful, costly, and disheartening experience that we are STILL cleaning up months later. I've worked with dozens of contractors professionally and personally, and that's about as honest as I can be about the whole experience. I don't think Phil was out to intentionally scam us. I just think he's an incompetent disorganized mess that's gotten away with it all these years with clients that knew less about construction and construction contracts than we did.