I hired DSP contractors to do a whole-house renovation of a historic home in Cleveland Park,…read moreWashington DC, including re-doing the kitchen, guest house, six bathrooms, and creating an entirely new master bedroom suite with new two new dormers in the third-story attic. This review focuses only on the attic master suite build, which we have recently completed. DSP Contractors and its owner Marcelo Palma were referred to me by my long-time realtor. I have hired many, many contractors in the past and I can say with complete confidence that DSP is stand-out firm. I have never been so happy or so comfortable dealing with a contractor and I really don't want to work with any other firm after dealing them. Marcelo is not only a highly skilled and tasteful contractor, but he also has the kind of interpersonal skills and commitment to customer satisfaction that you hardly ever find in a contractor.
Throughout this long and stressful project (we are living in the house with two toddlers throughout the renovations) Marcelo and his team have really been our family's trusted allies. DSP is a family company and Marcelo's brothers perform much of the work themselves. It was very clear that the whole team was personally invested in the success of the project. They were always on time -- in fact, they always pulled up 15 minutes early then waited politely outside until the clock struck 8am. (They would have preferred to start 30 mins sooner but agreed to push back their daily start time so that we could have some peace and quiet while getting the kids ready for school every day - just one example of the many courtesies that DSP extended to us to make the job easier to get through.) Everyone on the team was pleasant and helpful, we never had anyone in the house that the kids didn't recognize, and the job site and house were kept spotlessly clean - which was no small feat, because we had to rip holes in the walls from the attic to the basement for the support posts and new insulation. We had many, many compliments on the cleanliness and quality of work from the city inspectors.
During the course of the renovation Marcelo spent hours of time with me as we tried to figure out how to modernize and make extensive structural adjustments to a beautiful historic home. He spent days trying to find the least obtrusive pathway for our ducts, for example, and never hesitated to rip something out and redo it when we felt it was needed. I do not consider myself an easy client to work with - I am very particular about everything, and am very directive about how things should be done. Unfortunately, I also often get it wrong the first time, and Marcelo was extremely patient when I asked for changes (and was very fair about pricing those change orders, as well). I insisted on purchasing just about every faucet, tile, appliance and fixture for the house myself, and Marcelo and his team were truly generous in helping me select items and making them work. (Many of the plumbing fixtures, for example, were ordered from Britain and arrived with the wrong-sized connections, which required us to stop and re-start work as new parts came in, and Marcelo never complained or charged me extra for his plumbers to revisit the site, which I thought was extremely kind of him.) In fact, I had many opportunities to be appreciative of Marcelo's team attitude when it came to problem-solving. For example, the architect I hired made an egregious error in our plans to insert structural support posts from the basement to the new third floor dormers; an error that required Marcelo to make expensive and time-consuming changes. But again he did this without any complaints and while minimizing the time and inconvenience to me. Marcelo was also extremely flexible and gracious in agreeing to work with an electrician that I preferred to hire (because 've used him a bunch of times in the past and he gives me a great discount) rather than his own in-house guy.
I am extremely happy with the results of this project. I've included three photos of the work - one shows the gorgeous master bedroom shower that DSP built into an existing skylight, and another shows a skylight that pulls out to form a balcony in the bathroom. The third photo shows one of the two dormers that DSP added to the attic to create the master bedroom - this really doesn't do justice to the tremendously difficult dry-walling and detail work that was done around a dozen structural beams to create a high-ceilinged, arching room. The amount of time and care that DSP devoted to this work (and the trial and error involved in finding the right look) were truly impressive. My family is continuing to work with DSP as we complete our renovations, but I think so highly of the company that I did not want to wait to write this review.
