I am extremely disappointed with my experience with Natay Construction and their "process". We need a full renovation of our primary bathroom. I was nervous that Natay was the only contractor that asked me for money upfront in an hourly rate to create a plan and get bids for the bathroom. They gave me an initial estimate and then months and months later I finally get the "real" estimate for the bathroom which was almost 2X the initial estimate! The plan, materials, and layout had not changed at all.* We did not run into any hurdles that would have made the cost increase.
Process Made Me Feel Trapped: By the time I had gotten the proposal, the "hourly" hours billed was nearly double what I had agreed to and when I saw all of these bloated prices from subs, I was too nervous to wrack up more billable hours to have Eric go back and get better prices. I think this is the goal of their "process" - to make you feel like you are so far down the rabbit hole when you see this crazy number that you just give in.
No "Connections" with Subs: Now that I am getting my own quotes on the pieces of this project, all of the subs that Eric wanted to use were easily double the cost (not including the contractor fees) of the prices I am getting on my own (as a woman who knows nothing about construction). I thought the purpose of a contractor is that they know the right people to work with and know a reasonable price...
Extremely Slow: Getting answers from Eric was extremely slow. We started in February and I was originally supposed to have the whole project complete by early June. I didn't even get the 2X proposal until end of May. There were 6.5 weeks where I heard nothing back and had to reach out to Eric for an update multiple times. There was another time that I asked for one minor change and didn't hear back for 2 weeks.
I was so hopeful that I found a trustworthy contractor to help with our house projects, but my experience with Natay was just a waste of time and money. After raising these concerns, I asked for a refund of my upfront money. Eric stopped responding and someone else from the team said no.
* This is TMI, but the upfront billable hours did increase due to looking into projects beyond the initial bathroom. Eric kept encouraging me that I would "save money" by doing all these other house projects at one time. The bill for all those things was like 4X the original price. I then asked for him to take everything out and see just the bathroom so I could compare apples to apples (just the bathroom was almost a full 2X more than the initial quote for just the bathroom). read more