Pros: Noem is responsive, shows up when he says, finishes the job when he says, and his quote WAS fair (with caveats below), not the highest and not the lowest. Knows city codes and when to hire an architect.
Cons: Does not admit it when he makes a mistake. Does not make good on his mistakes without charging you for it. Does not take pride in his work (not detail oriented). Is not patient with picky people.
Finding good contractors is hard so when I came across the great reviews and saw that Noem is not flaky, the decision to hire him was not hard.
We gutted our entire house and moved walls around. Expanded our kitchen, created two closets, a brand new laundry room and a brand new bathroom.
Our biggest issue was his temperament and the amount of extra charges we incurred because of mistakes on his part.
When we made a mistake like not realizing we had to move a vent (after drywall was done) to make room for a chandelier base, we paid for it, as we should.
But when he made a mistake like not squaring off the corners in our dining room while squaring off the corners in the connected hallway, he would not admit fault. He claimed when he asked us about corners, he was only referring to the hallway. Not true.
He never explicitly named any room. He asked if we want square or round corners so we naturally assumed he meant all corners that were being plastered.
We had to pay $700 to square off the remaining corners in the dining room connecting to the hallway.
This was only one of MANY mistakes like that which he would not own and flat out denied costing us $$$. Listing them here would be too long to read.
What is most difficult to endure is Noem's unyielding attitude.
For example, when he made a mistake in the bathroom, admited it only AFTER I showed him proof via text (before that he argued), and offered to redo the entier bathroom, we let it go even though we were very dissapointed that our bathroom, built from scratch did not turn out the way we wanted it. We didn't want to be unreasonable.
But when we asked him not to charge us for the squaring of the dining room corners because we didn't have him redo the entire bathroom, he would not budge. You decide if that's fair or not.
Lastly, if you like good craftsmenship, he's not your guy. Noem uses one guy and his brother for laying tile, plaster, drywall, skim coating, base boards etc.
For example, they laid down tile without plastic spacers and because of that we did not get the spacing we wanted AND they are completely uneven.
The wall in our bathroom and kitchen should have been spaced 1/8 and the floor 1/16. See for yourself closeups with ruler and pulled back to see how uneven they are. The wall wasn't quite 1/8 and way smaller in other areas. The floor didn't even come close to our agreed 1/16.
We were so very bummed. This was supposed to be our dream bathroom built from scratch. There was no reason for it not to be what we wanted. And again, we did not have him redo it because we were being reasonable.
Another example, our modern square baseboards did not have straight smooth edges on the exposed sides. Later when we did the bedrooms ourselves, we realized by sheer coincidence his worker was using the wrong tool, a circular saw, the same one we used that gave us uneven edges. So we rented the proper tool, a miter saw, instead which gave us perfectly straight and smooth edges.
Expect lots of shortcuts like that to save money if you care about details.
Also expect for them to make asthetic decisions without running it by you like the color of the fan vent cover in the bathroom and kitchen, or like not discussing options on how to bring the corners of the tile together in the bathroom step (see phtoos) etc. etc. etc.
By the end, the job became a disaster with screaming matches as his unyielding and argumentative nature got to me. He does not aim to please the customer and based on older reviews about not charging for changes, he has clearly learned he needs to charge for every change but the problem is, aside from charging you when he makes a mistake, he takes advantage and extra charges are too high.
All in all, he would have gotten 4 stars if he was patient, admited when he was wrong and did right by us. He would have gotten 5 stars if he was detail oriented.
As a business owner myself, I know what it's like to be on the other side and I would never treat a paying customer, no matter how picky, the way he treated us when he dissagreed with us.
Besides, we felt after $150,000 we were entitled to being picky. Don't you think? read more