The small sample of public reviews should have been a giveaway... However, we still hired Chris/Privilege Construction to do what was supposed to be a full gut renovation. I would recommend anyone looking to hire Chris to keep reading, and then think again.
We found Chris through Sweeten.com, a good website for obtaining vetted contractor names. However, they only make money from contractors and solely support the contractors if the project goes south - go read their reviews.
First, the good with Chris. He is a yes man, something we originally liked. He says yes to everything. Every idea, every suggestion - he can do it all, so he says. This gets annoying after a while when you realize he's just saying what you want to hear. Chris is relatively easy to get ahold of. He picks up the phone more often than not, or will return calls promptly. Also, he's not a penny pincher when it comes to change orders. We made plenty of changes throughout our contract without any fuss from Chris having to charge us extra.
Now for the bad. As a general contractor, Chris does not have the deep rolodex you'd expect from someone leading your project. He doesn't have a list of 5-6 subcontractors lined up ready and waiting on jobs. We had to wait weeks for a plumber to show up and had to bring in our own HVAC company. His workers and subcontractors are disrespectful and careless, they don't think two steps ahead. We had damage to a brand-new fiberglass tub due to a worker wearing boots in the tub and there was the time they left brand new molding outside in the rain, thus ruining it. Often it felt like his guys would measure once and cut twice. During our project we had to place three separate molding orders and had to place additional orders for backsplash, flooring, and bathroom tiles due to waste and/or incorrect measurements, all of which came from out of our pocket.
Back to Chris. He's not a good communicator and he has poor project management organization - two important characteristics you expect in your GC. Twice there were 2+ week periods when we had no workers at the house and there were multiple days when only 1 guy showed up. Chris would tell us to order finishes yet they would sit around for 90+ days well past their return date if we didn't like it once installed. They would paint before finishing the floors or demo a perfectly good bathroom we were using before the new bathroom was ready. When a new job was being started there was little to no notification from Chris. On top of that, there were multiple times he would leave town for family vacations without any prior notification.
And for the icing on the cake, Chris burned our house down. read more