I recently hired these people to do my bathroom and to be honest, I was not overly happy with the experience.
First - the good stuff - they did deliver a nice bathroom ... eventually.
I was told my bathroom would take no longer than 3 weeks. 8 weeks later, I finally had it signed off.
The main problem we had was with their trades - they were all subbies. i found the majority of their trades quite unprofessional and careless. I will start with their builder. After the old bathroom was ripped out, they left a hole in the floor of about 30cm x 12cm. We asked them if the hole would be temporarily covered as we have cats and one of them is quite curious in nature. She is also very small and can get into the tiniest of spaces. We also asked them to make sure that any gaps under the doors were also covered so the cats cannot get in as we did not want to go onto the worksite. Well, they did not do that and one of my cats decided to go exploring and ended up trapped underneath the floorboards. After 3 hours, we were able to get her out. We rang Freedom and asked why it was not covered and their excuse? "We forgot". No apologies, no nothing.
The builder also put several holes in the wall when he was careless when he was cutting through the plasterboard and because of his carelessness, I was left with several large cuts in my dining room wall which then had to be repaired - yet another trade needed to come in and fix that! The plumbers were also careless and made several large cuts in the new bathtub so they had to get yet another person in to fix the error. The sparkies had to come back a few times to correct some electrical. The waterproofer (while a very nice person) decided to tell his his entire life story so his part of the job, that was only supposed to take 2 hours took all afternoon and the following morning to complete - 7 hours in total. In his defense though, it did pick up on a major error made by both the builder and the plumber - who forgot to put the floor waste in which meant yet another plumber coming out to put it in (and another delay!).
The painter had to come back out twice because he used the wrong colour and left paint all over the bath, tiles and the rails. The cleaning crew had to come back twice because they did such a bad job the first time.
All of their subbies also smoked on premises (outside) even though I requested them not to.
Kudos though to Toby the Tiler that they used. He was the only trade that did not screw anything up and his is the job that I am most happy with.
I found the lack of care and communication from Freedom in poor form. When we bought up errors and problems, they seem to ignore us for a few days but they were very prompt in making sure their bills were sent to us! (note the sarcasim there!).
Would I use them again - definitely not and it is mainly due to the constant delays, lack of professionalism and poor communication. read more
