My wife and I contracted with AIS to add a two-story addition to our rural home near Circleville Ohio. We worked with a local professional architect to come up with a design and blueprints for our planned building and eventually lined up two willing contractors for this work. AIS was the more expensive, by about ten thousand dollars, but we believed they had more resource and flexibility than the other outfit. Throughout the job term our payments were timely and good, with no complaints received from AIS.
This is a family-operated business. Main guy is PD, the daily job site supervisor was SD. If someone in the family staff is a weak link, he/she can't or won't be replaced or fired. Big disadvantage.
The cement contractor was the best. We later had him put in our own completely new driveway.
Most other tradesmen were very good.
The large construction dumpster was placed on our macadam driveway, causing serious damage which became our expensive responsibility to repair/replace. We didn't expect that.
Overall materials quality seemed good and acceptable, until we experienced a serious water infiltration problem with a window. I looked up Alside Manufacturing and learned that these windows are sold on the basis of being budget attractive. Ok, just say cheaper. No better option was mentioned. They are not easy to open and close and were damaged in a couple of spots. PD fixed one spot.
We opted for oak hardwood flooring for our main living area floor. After installation was complete, nobody from AIS came back to look it over for a good install. A couple of weeks later, after we had fully furnished and decorated the room, multiple installation defects were made note of by us, including cracks, splits, chips at joints, and unevenness. I photographed and made video of more than 30 individual bad spots. AIS brought in the factory sales rep, then made an issue of humidity in our home. Neither of these blame shifts was legitimate. PD finally said they would correct not more than six bad spots, but we held off on that 20% solution. We see the flooring issues every day.
The job began in late January 2025. A lot of excavation material was mounded on our rear lawn, with the promise from PD that "we will restore your lawn to the way it was before the job was done." No easy way to say this.... that was a lie. Some grass has regrown, but most of it is very thin, with obvious bare patches.
The foundation contractor built the main block wall one full course too high. My wife was the first to realize this. SD had to bring the crew back to slice off one full finished block course, with all of the finished treatment on top of it. That cost a full week of delay, and who knows how much expense. One of the special-ordered basement window units was shattered, and was not replaced for about six weeks, leaving it open into our basement all the while.
The block foundation for our new rear entry stairwell was built about 1-1/2 inches out of square, first discovered by me. Not SD. He came back a few days later and partially corrected this error, leaving it only 3/4" out of square. It's there today.
We often were not well informed of ongoing steps to our project, most of which didn't cause a problem. AIS has a communication web portal which was not well utilized; surprises were frequent.
Repeated requests for a comprehensive warranty document for our home addition were given short shrift. "We have a two-year warranty and should call the office when a problem arises." A toaster at Walmart gets a better document than this.
SD stopped by on a day we weren't home to clean up debris. He removed a small pile of things I wanted to save, which is why I had placed it about 75 feet away from all of the work. All was taken. Very disappointed.
In more than three months of work none of the crews brought their own generator; all relied on using our 120-volt outlets, sometimes blowing breakers. I made PD aware, and a credit was given. That web site portal spells out our invoices, special orders, and payments. It had a place for credits, but AIS did not use that.
Most glaring problem: Poor job site management. Supervising your daily tradesmen, looking over the job for problems. Finding, reporting, and correcting them. The biggest missed problem cost a full week of job progress and certainly damaged the profit budget for AIS.
My wife and I are retired working professionals. Had we not strived to keep carefully aware of details day to day, things could have gotten and remained much worse. We simply wanted to receive the good job, and the completed final product that we had contracted and fully paid for. We didn't get it. The Two-Star grading of AIS reflects that we do like the overall result, but the process was painful, the uncorrected mistakes are obvious, and they are ours alone. read more
