I will never work with this company again! Throughout my entire project, I perceived them to be…read moreinefficient and non-communicative. There were several instances where they have been dishonest and attempted to upcharge me for work that was included in our contract. They sell themselves as a 'full service' company, but this could not be further from the truth. Instead of making the process smoother, they caused countless hours of additional work and stress for me and my husband.
We contracted with New DImensions to renovate our kitchen back in February 2022, making it very clear we needed this renovation done before our baby came in October - this was agreed upon in our contract.
They did not start the job until September - 9 months later, despite us continuously following up to see how we could move things forward more quickly. They were completely unresponsive and not at all transparent about what was causing the delays. My son is now 3 months old, and they JUST finished (January 2023) - 5 months after starting what should have been a 2-3 month job.
New Dimensions also came to us with ~$15k of additional items they attempted to charge us for throughout the project, threatening to shut the project down if we didn't pay, so we felt like we were trapped. Some of these were for things that were expressly called out in our contract, like some HVAC work and building out a few closets.
Several times, they demanded we pay them early for milestones that had not yet been completed (it is worth noting that the payment milestones are structured in a way so a majority of the cost if front-loaded, meaning we had paid ~80% of the project cost before they had completed even 50% of the work). It was exhausting to constantly be fighting with them every step of the way and caused long delays.
When we brought up our dissatisfaction about the delayed timeline and repeated upcharges, some of the employees were downright offensive - literally screaming and yelling at us in a completely unprofessional way.
During the project, we had issues with the speed of work, quality of work, speed of sourcing materials, cost of materials, and project management. A few of those included:
Speed of work: for a full kitchen renovation, the biggest crew they usually sent was 2 people who (after factoring in breaks) only typically worked 4-5 hours each day - often there was only one person on the job site. There was limited planning for lead times or dependencies, which caused several unnecessary multi-week delays.
Quality of work: they made a lot of mistakes during the project that, instead of fixing immediately when pointed out, they tried to convince us were proper, or that we needed to pay more money to fix. For instance, installing a support beam with a gap between the beam and the floor above so the floor above bounced when walking on it, installing the header for the fridge crooked, measuring the width of the island wrong so we now have a hole in the tile floor that the island doesn't cover, designing a cabinet intended to hang pans that isn't tall enough to hang pans, etc...
Speed of sourcing: Often the men would arrive at our house and wouldn't have the materials they needed, so they would just stand around not working for the entire day. For the items New Dimensions said they'd source for us, turns out they actually only provided a quote and we then had to place the order. The quote sometimes took weeks of asking for and ultimately caused delays to the project because we could not order the items in a timely manner.
Cost of materials (cost of which is passed through to the customer): we had one instance where they bought a small amount of siding for $6,000, which was astronomical. We had them return it and brought in our other, trusted contractor, who purchased the same materials for $2,000. This made us question every other material charge they brought to us, but at this point it was too late to go back through and do an audit.
Project management: The 'project manager' they assigned to our project was almost completely absent - he dropped by the job site typically once per week and often didn't know what needed to be done. Frequently, the crew working had no idea what they were supposed to be working on when they arrived. When the project manager came, he rarely wrote anything down and claimed that some of the items were not in his department - we would then have to speak to several other employees at New Dimensions to get them accomplished. They also tried to forbid us from talking to the crew that was working in our house, effectively cutting us off from productive conversations we could have had to move the job forward. Me and my husband ended up taking over most of the project management towards the end.
