We were extremely unhappy with the work Pedernales Construction did on our home. From start to finish, everything was careless and lazy.
--Permit: Blake was extremely responsive until we gave him our 50% deposit. It took over two months to obtain the permit. Part of that was the city's fault because of all the bureaucratic red tape, but a large part was PC's fault for not being on top of it at all. Only after multiple phone calls a day from us did this finally get resolved.
--Structural: this went well for the most part. When the crew actually showed up, they worked. The only major problems here were lack of communication between, Blake, Landon, us, and the crew. Since Landon didn't check on things on certain days, the crew just did whatever, and some stuff had to be redone the way we had discussed. Again, nothing egregious and most of this part of the job was fine except for the huge problem that they installed the pocket doors before being painted (which we had originally asked for). This caused major problems later.
--Finishing: this is where everything went wrong and why we would never recommend this company. They only sent one guy out to do the taping, floating, and sanding and he did terrible--absolutely terrible--work. You can see the tape through our ceiling and all of the seams where the new beams are and where the new sheetrock is. Blake defended that work as fine and even blamed it on our house being older--which is ridiculous because the age of our house has nothing to do with the quality of new construction. Even worse, unbelievably, was the paint job, which we were told would be by "the best painter in central Texas." Again, sloppy work that had to be redone almost three times before we were even willing to live with it. Even now, there are so many problem areas that were never fixed.
--Invoicing: Blake shamelessly nickeled and dimed us on the final bill. From the start, we always had double pocket doors, but because the contract had "pocket door," singular, he charged us almost another $700. He charged us $35 for a couple light outlets that cost $2 at Home Depot. He also double charged for moving electrical outlets (which we had already agreed would be included in the cost of fixing the baseboards in our study). We didn't even have the strength to fight him on any of it because we just wanted the project to finally be over.
Overall, the work was not good work, and certainly not worth the price tag. Don't use this company if you actually care about how your finished product will look. If you hire PC for some rental properties, you'd probably be fine, but just be sure to have the contract be as detailed as possible, keep a daily log, and put your foot down. Blake accused us of micromanaging and not knowing what we were taking about as a defense mechanism to get us to back off, but we really wish we would have been firmer. Lesson learned. read more