Frame To Finish

Excellent! Mark and his team of professionals were prompt, accessable and detailed in their work. Even when things didn't go as planned and an issue with our drainage was identified, Mark and his crew provided us with options and were able to stay within budget.

The project did not go well. Drywall did not meet the original ceramic baseboard smoothly - gaps and uneven baselineWe chose the sink and faucet from a catalog while out of town - Mark ordered it - it came right away and sat in our garage until install, at which time Mark opened it up and discovered that that faucet set up was not compatible with the sink - he ordered the correct faucet and then charged us the restocking fee for picking the incorrect set-upIn-wall piping was not secured well, resulting in loose faucets which then broke away from the wall and had to be re-caulked. Eventually one of the men had to come back and secure the piping accessible through my daughter's bedroom panelIn-wall piping was not adjusted to fit the drain of the new vanity, resulting in a sideways, white PVC contraption rigged up to make the p-trap fit with the wall pipe. This looks awful especially considering the open nature of our vanity and also impedes the intended storage area of that space.Re-install of toilet required multiple visits to fix a broken flange and tighten the toilet bolts securely to the floor. Even so, the floor print of the toilet doesn't match the original print (even though it's the same toilet), so you can see the marred tile surface which was originally underneath the toilet for years.One of the original problems was that the toilet lid jutted out too far and hit the door - we were told that a new toilet with a smaller lead out from the wall would be $400 and up, i.e. cost prohibitive. This turned out to be completely untrue - there are several options out there for reasonable prices that would have eliminated this obstacle. Second, we asked about a different toilet seat, as we needed just a 1/2 inch or so to clear the door - we were told that toilet seats are standard and that there weren't seats out there that would fit our toilet and still give us that extra space. My husband found one by default a couple months after the project was finished - works perfectly and clears the doorway.Tiling the shower - ugh. The tiling job is fairly nice, however, it involved three recessed boxes and the edging to those boxes turned out to be complicated and time-consuming. Much to our chagrin, we discovered that Mark had never done edging like that before the so the portion of the remodel took MUCH LONGER than expected. Bear in mind, this was our only shower - I was showering at the Y, friends' houses, school, etc, so time was critical.Recessed vanity mirror - the recessed box was not square, so when the mirror finally arrived, it didn't fit perfectly around the edges. When I was reviewing the project, I noticed this, pointed it out to Mark and he said it was a natural result of variation in the structure of a recessed wall area - studs weren't completely straight, etc. I asked him for solutions to the gaps - he said he could feather in mudding and repaint or he could caulk and we could repaint that. For the sake of the ridiculously long and at this point, tense, work in the middle of our house, I asked him to simply caulk it. He caulked one side.Wall cabinet - this was to be a $400 custom cabinet - extremely simple - 3 shelves, shallow, square outline, 2 mirrored doors. The cabinet was not done by the end of the other remodeling work, despite the fact that it was one of the first fixtures we established. It was damaged during the first trip to our house - Mark returned it to his cabinet maker - when it arrived the second time, it still had scuffs and unfinished edges. It also didn't match the simple white vanity we had - apparently our lighting made it look more yellow. We sent it back to get a different white - again with a drawer from our vanity to make an exact color match. It now had a pink hue. After the third try, we finally had a simple white cabinet.Biggest complaint, aside from the quality of the finished work, the time. The workmen did not put in 8- hour days until the second week when we complained about their 11-3 or 1-4 daily schedule. They then made up the time by working until 10-11 pm - bear in mind that the bathroom shares a wall with my 2 1/2 yr-old's bedroom. They also came on weekends - here was our choice: put up with the crazy hours so we could shower and have a toilet on our main floor, or enforce a standard work day and wait even longer for a usable bathroom. We chose to have the bathroom finished. The project during the last week of July and we didn't have a finished room until mid-September. Our final bill was approximately $1000 more than the approved contract quote we signed in July. Never again.