We had a major remodel of our home with Yarden Builder. Yarden came recommended by a major realtor in our area and someone in our neighborhood. They were the top-middle tier bid out of 5. I had seen a home they worked on so it looked like a go.
To be upfront - I don't want to blame all issues we had on them. There were delays in materials, construction mistakes were made, communication errors happened and we changed our minds several times. All of which were par for the course/expected and we happily paid for/expected.
On a personal level, we liked our GC River. My issues were with many of the sub-contractors he hired, which were ultimately in our view his responsibility. I felt his eye was way more on the bottom line than hiring quality guys. Many of the subs were "do the basics" types in my opinion. Examples being:
I noticed half way through the installation of tiles in our master bath shower, that the whole thing was crooked. I alerted the GC and they ripped it out. I was told we needed to pick a more basic shape/design (we had nothing exotic originally). The people at the tile store were baffled by the "simpler" request and a manager came to speak to me, asking if he could recommend a different installer. This was my first major red flag on our project. Eventually we got the shower completed, minus the first batch of tile (eating $2,200) with a more "basic" tile. The grout in several places of our master shower has since fallen out in the last six months. The tile installation in two bathrooms, a laundry room and the kitchen was average at best. Large patches of lippage can be found on brand new virgin walls.
More red flags, big and small, piled up quickly. We had three arched doorways redone three times because they had no idea how to do them. They freestyled the arches by hand individually, resulting in corners that were way off from each other in the same arch. They still look bad and guests often comment about them. They're better than the previous two attempts.
We replaced all the flooring in the house. I was surprised to walk in on the sub-contractor halfway through the engineered hardwood install to see our old wood floors hadn't been taken out (the plan the GC and I had originally discussed). We were told it'd be stronger, which I know is a thing. However our new floors squeak in all the same places as our old ones - nothing was reinforced or filled and no solution to the issue was offered. I suspect the primary reasoning was cost.
The worst experiences were with the cabinet subcontractor (Golan) for the master closets, utility room storage, bathroom wall cabinet, and kitchen - representing significant portions of the remodel budget.
We wanted semi custom cabinets in the kitchen. The installation was absolutely terrible. Embarrassingly wonky gaps are everywhere, pull-out shelves installed where we didn't want them, or multiples in places where we wanted one or none. I went to the trouble of labeling where we wanted pull-outs to go and they completely ignored it. Our pantry stuck out into a doorway a good four inches and had to be chopped in the back to fit because they didn't measure for it correctly. Now several shelves inside the pantry are uneven which I can't figure out how. The cabinet around my fridge is shaped like an "S" and needs to be completely replaced. Two vertical pull outs aren't what we had asked for and the replacements were never installed. A large dinnerware drawer in our island is misaligned and jams (also missing the handle/hardware because the holes were drilled in the wrong location) and a large cookware drawer below that falls out onto the floor. I'm also betting they didn't paint all the doors & drawer fronts at the same time because we have three different tones throughout. The paint was supposedly corrected twice but they still got it wrong.
The cabinet guys were super flaky, said they showed up when they didn't (we have Ring cameras everywhere), and said they fixed the issues when they didn't. After many times out to correct their sloppy work, they stopped showing up. Because Golan (the cabinet subcontractor) couldn't get his act together, we went with California Closets for our utility room and master closets. Thankfully California Closets was super professional and got it right the first time.
On top of all of this, there was other amateur work from other subs: lights popping out of ceilings, sloppy painting throughout leaving us to spend god knows how many hours scraping off overspray on our brand new furniture, floors, windows, and plenty of holes just drilled in places where they got the screw/bolt/grounding rod location wrong. Our dishwasher leaked on the first run, damaging our wood floors, a sink was installed incorrectly twice but now we can't fix it without redoing the entire tile/sink cabinet, sizable holes were left in our roof from the plumbers, and the cherry on top was leftover grout/stucco dumped down our patio drains, clogging them when read more
