First, this business is not licensed by NYC Department of Consumer Affairs, which means that, if things go wrong (see below), a homeowner has limited recourse. Now my experience:
Despite being paid more than $100000 to do renovation work on a 2-family house in Brooklyn, NY, Accrete Construction Group performed work that I believe to be of very poor quality and did not complete the job. They were also about a year past the contract deadline for completion when I finally gave them a stop order. At that point, they pretended that the work was nearly finished while the apartment was, in my opinion, likely months away from being habitable. Here are some specifics:
- Accrete Construction installed sheetrock in a bathroom without installing the water supply lines. The bathroom was presented as "nearly finished". However, I believe it was nowhere near functional, and, obviously, I cannot see why the walls should have been built without any water supply lines present.
- In some rooms built by Accrete Construction, the metal studs used were not attached to anything, resulting in walls that, I believe, have little structural integrity. Some walls were flimsy and could be moved by hand.
- Accrete Construction built walls within rooms with, in my opinion, no regard for the dimensions specified in the plans in the bid set, thereby rendering the rooms unusable. For example, the long wall in the kitchen went from 120 inches (as specified in the bid set) to 112 inches, making it, I believe, impossible to build the kitchen as per the bid set.
- In a bathroom, because Accrete Construction built a wall on top of the old wall, the toilet hole was only 12 inches away from the side wall (instead of 16 inches), basically making it, I believe, impossible to use.
- I believe that the workers employed were not qualified, were negligent and were unsupervised. Incredibly, upon opening up the walls, we found rests of food and a water bottle in new walls built by Accrete Construction.
- The metal post put in by a subcontractor of Accrete Construction was not straight.
- The vent for the dryer was held together by duct tape and was full of holes.
- Metal studs installed by Accrete Construction were already rusted at the bottom in the basement.
- The drain pipe for the toilet in a bathroom newly renovated by Accrete Construction, was completely disintegrated and I think it should have been changed. As is, I believe the toilet would have leaked right away.
- I believe that walls and ceilings were generally built in a wildly uneven manner. I believe that almost nothing they built was straight.
- Both floors Accrete Construction put in were, I believe, improperly installed and were not level.
Accrete Construction also did not provide - or pay for - materials that were explicitly listed in the contract documents and that they were responsible to pay for: A/C condenser units, wood flooring, expensive sliding door hardware, mechanical fire rated door, frameless glass shower door, kitchen and bathroom countertops, Benjamin Moore paint etc. By my count, these material add up to more than $23000.
It seems to me that Accrete Construction repeatedly did not respect the specifications of the contract: I believe they did not pay attention to drawings, blueprints and generally built things in a haphazard way. I also think that they were also a nightmare to deal with: routinely late, bad with returning phone calls and emails. When confronted about issues by the architect and myself, the President of the company and his managers systematically got defensive. In my opinion, they made excuses for everything, blamed the architect and would not accept responsibility for anything.
To be sure, I was not knowledgeable about construction when I started this process and there are many things I would do differently now. This was my first house renovation. I definitely should not have paid this company as much as I did given what seems to me the low quality of the work, and the many delays. Despite doing research and trying to get things right, I was naive.
I will let everyone here draw their own conclusions but I have started a claim with the NYC Department of Consumer Affairs. read more