Home Sweet Home recently finished our basement. We finally ended with the nice finished basement we envisioned and the subcontractors that HSH uses for electrical and plumbing are great. However, based on our experience and the amount of REWORK/time it took to get to this point I would not recommend HSH for a big project for these reasons:
- Not having Nathan involved during the estimate/ signing initial proposal. The detailed pricing sheet was one of the reasons we chose HSH but there were some misses in the pricing sheet costs that he likely would have caught earlier. The fact that it was a detailed pricing sheet doesn't help if it is wrong from the beginning. It also led to him emailing us with an ultimatum at the end of the project because we wanted him to honor the text he sent us regarding one of the errors in the allowances.
- The final cleaning was done before all of the issues were fixed and the crew did not clean up well after fixing things so we had to clean after them on our own even though we paid for final cleaning.
- The framing, drywall and taping/mudding crews rushed to complete the job and it created alot of rework. This included busting out drywall and reframing in 9 different areas. There was a major quality issue where we had a glass door installed under the staircase. It took 5 attempts for them to get it fixed properly and even with all the rework the trim at the bottom is partly under mudding. All of this made this project take longer to complete (17 weeks instead of ~12 weeks)
- Each crew always seemed to be willing to listen to us, but because there was a language barrier they sometimes had a hard time understanding what we meant which led to the wrong results
- There was a different crew completing each step (different crews for framing, drywall, taping/mudding, painting, flooring, finishing etc). We had to explain what was being done multiple times to each crew. And because they weren't provided with the floor plan they would do something wrong requiring rework (correcting door swings, uncovering electrical outlets and wiring for fixtures, finding where access panels should be) This wouldn't have been an issue if there was at least one person that was consistently involved that could explain things to each crew and check in regularly to make sure that they were completing the work correctly.
- The crews don't quality check each other and the only issues that will get fixed are the ones you (the customer) point out even if the crew knows it's an issue. For example, the framing and drywall was crooked on 4 of 5 bump outs, the column and bar knee wall. Instead of the flooring person pointing out that they were crooked and saying it needed to be fixed, he cuts the flooring planks at a slant to conform. When we finally saw the issues, they had to be fixed in such a way to hide the slanted flooring planks.
- The crews didn't always follow through on things that Nathan said would get done and Nathan was too busy to check in often so the crew would tell him things were done when it really wasn't.
- The crew was not good at drywalling and mudding columns, windows and bump outs. It took multiple attempts to fix these quality issues with crooked drywall and bumpy mudding that had already been painted. This also meant the crew had to keep repainting and caused some of the paint on walls to look blotchy.
-Throughout the project when we let Nathan know about issues he would say that addressing the issues later was part of the process. But when we went over issues that had not yet been resolved with his finishing crew their reaction made it obvious that the issues should have been resolved earlier in the process. read more