We used Biehl Brothers for our recent bathroom refresh. We had a few bumps along the way, but an…read moreoverall good experience.
THE GOOD:
* Workmanship. We're very pleased with the quality of the work completed. Good attention to detail.
* Personnel. Everyone we interacted with was proficient and pleasant to work with. We had no qualms about leaving home while the crew was working.
* Price. Biehl's bid was right in the middle of the 4 bids we solicited. For what we received, I feel that the price we paid was reasonable.
* Communication. Biehl tries to use a single point of contact on their staff for all communication. Mine was Brian Jensen. Biehl uses the CoConstruct website portal (and app) to streamline all communication. Co-Construct itself is a nice idea, but has some annoying bugs that affect clients (like us) in real ways. I reported 5 bugs and 4 feature requests to Amber at CoConstruct (not Biehl) on 2018-01-12. All of the bugs I reported were related to messaging. Hopefully they get fixed quickly for future users, as they were the source of several miscommunications between Biehl and me.
* Warranty work. We experienced some problems with the humidifier's pressure switch after installation. Biehl sent out a crew member to fix it on 2018-01-19. It worked for a while, but the fix was incomplete, and the problem reoccurred. Another visit is scheduled (free of charge) to make it right.
THE BUMPS:
* Schedule. Biehl has a policy that they won't leave a job until the customer has nothing more for them to do. The net effect, however, is that if you're the job next in line, your project start date is likely to be delayed. In our case, when we signed the contract on 2017-09-25, we were told that it "might be possible" to have our 2.5-week job *completed* before Thanksgiving. However, the actual project *start* date was the Monday *after* Thanksgiving.
Construction started 2017-11-27 and was estimated to take around 2.5 weeks. That estimate was pretty much spot-on (11 working days). However, the shower door wasn't ordered early enough (an oops by Biehl), and consequently it didn't arrive until 2017-12-26. Because of this, the total duration of the job was more like a month than 2.5 weeks.
Further, the subcontractor for the shower door (Basco) made several mistakes, and the first two doors they attempted to fabricate did not fit the opening properly. The door wasn't installed until 2018-01-17. 4 weeks of the job were delays caused by subcontractor mistakes.
We're actually still waiting for warranty work on the humidifier. By the time that's completed, the entire job will have taken 12 weeks. A good portion of this isn't Biehl's direct fault.
* Quoting process. The quoting process was very thorough. In fact, it was more thorough than any of the other 3 contractors who made bids. However, Biehl did not itemize and only provided a cost roll-up (just the total). There were 5 revisions of the quote, and the final revision was $3,042 more than my initial quote. It was very frustrating to figure out what potion of that cost delta was due to selections, things I added, or omissions/mistakes by Biehl. It took many messages and phone calls (over the course of an entire month) to get a clear explanation for the cost growth.
$750 was added for bathtub items that Biehl forgot to list on the initial quote, even though they were listed in my selections. Also, several of the selection allowances in the initial quote were very small, including the shower door allowance that was $600 too small. (If your quote has allowances, beware that they may be conservative in order to present a more appealing bottom line.)
If we use Biehl again, I will require that the quote be finalized with all selections before any construction work begins.
* Overloaded staff. It became clear that our primary point of contact (Brian) has way too much on his plate. So much so, that he was not able to respond promptly when we needed to get in touch. Other symptoms: Brian forgot about several conversations that we had, even though many of them were recorded digitally on CoConstruct. In many cases, it took concerted effort on my part to ensure that nothing fell through the cracks. Additionally, Brian accidentally omitted some items from our selection list, one of which resulted in me having to scramble 45 minutes across town to select grout colors before the morning. A few times, I had to text Brian directly to get his attention on CoConstruct; sadly, he only asked me to repeat the question on CoConstruct (which I had already done). Brian is a smart and pleasant guy--he just has way too much responsibility allocated to him, and that impacted his effectiveness. I hope he can hand off some of his workload so that he can place greater focus on his customers throughout the entire process.
SUMMARY:
Overall, we were satisfied with Biehl's work. We look forward to inviting Biehl to bid on our next job. I encourage you to do the same.
