Long overdue 5-star review for Fran Yetso Construction! We had a large addition to our house (adding a second floor and doubling our square footage; almost half a million dollars when all said and done). Looking back, I can't imagine what it would have been like with anyone other than Fran.
When we first started thinking about our project, everyone would tell us "You have to be careful! You can't trust contractors, they'll just take your money and leave and you'll be stuck!" Having been through the process, I can see where all the concern is on both sides: home renovation is an inherently complex process with countless important details, and overlooking or miscommunicating even one of them can spell disaster that neither side wants to be responsible for.
No matter how good your planning, you're going to have unexpected stuff you have to work through with your contractor. In our case, we had a lot of challenges with our architecting process, so, that lead to even more overlooked details that could have been disastrous. In each case, Fran and I were able to sit down, have adult conversations, think of solutions, and come to agreements I felt were fair. At many points, he could have made demands and I would have been stuck with either accepting them or being left with half a house sitting out in the rain. But, I think he's the type of person who foremost wants to be able to look back on his life as having done lots of quality work with integrity -- which I was very thankful for in those situations.
If you want to get accurate cost estimates (with any Contractor), spend any extra money to get extra time with your architect filling in details. Never accept "oh, you can decide and figure out those things when you get there." Do your windows open vertically or horizontally? How big is your toilet going to be and how much space is there between it and your sink countertop edge? What's the natural slope of the ground you're putting your foundation on? Having architectural plans with details explicitly annotated down to this level will make everyone's life easier and save you thousands of dollars after the city inspector comes in. Mistakes we made in our architecting process that could have been disastrous nightmares, but, thankfully, were manageable with Fran.
I remember my main question at the beginning of the process was "will the cost I'm quoted be the cost I pay in the end?" The final answer: well, no. But, that's because I chose to turn it into something much fancier than what I started with. I do believe that had I kept to the original plan, Fran would have kept within a reasonable bound of his original cost just fine.
The next question we had was "will they maintain the timeline they've quoted?" The answer: pretty darn close to it even though we increased the scope as we went. It was actually us that often slowed things down, wanting more time to think about key decisions we needed to make. Fran was quite eager to keep things humming along and we certainly had no sense of feeling abandoned or anything.
Naturally, for a project this size, there were a million other questions we had. Rather than enumerate them all here, I'd be happy to answer any questions messaged to my yelp profile. But, in short, we were incredibly lucky to have found Fran and enlisted his help in building our home into a structure with both a professional sturdiness to it and a uniquely designed personality we love :) read more