Subject: Extremely unprofessional and unreliable
We hired…read morePritchard Construction last July. We got impressed by the charming talking of Richard Pritchard, his competitive bid and his past experience with similar projects. It turned out that hiring them was a very bad decision. We had a truly terrible experience, which, later on, we found out to share with other customers (see reviews on Google, Yelp, Google, BuildZoom and even their Facebook page). We can describe Pritchard Construction as unprofessional and unreliable.
Here is a brief account of our experience with Pritchard Construction. My wife and I decided to build a concrete pool in our backyard. After contacting various pools professionals, we chose to do the work by hiring different contractors for the different parts of the project: digging, concrete work, electrical, pluming etc.
We hired Pritchard to do the excavation, build the cinder block pool walls and poor the concrete deck all around the pool to match the existing deck we already had. The work, according to Pritchard, should have taken about two-three weeks. They started the excavation on August 4th, 2020. The first week of work was very positive. We had an unexpected delay (during the excavation, we broke an irrigation line, which according to the Kennewick Irrigation District shouldn't have been there). Pritchard promptly fixed the line and after a two-day delay the excavation work started again. From there on everything went sideway. Pritchard and his crew started coming to work on our project only sporadically, saying that they had another project (a condo complex in Pasco) of which they couldn't control the scheduled (they were called on demand and the project was too big to say no). We tried to be very understanding and patient. August passed by and we started being concerned. We tried to reach them over the phone or email. We had not clue of when they would have continued the work. The few times we could talk with the office person (Pritchard's wife, Miranda), she either acted clueless or denied what she told previously: "I do not what to tell you, I just work in the office", "I do not what the schedule is", "I need to talk to the front man", "We will get back to you" (she rarely did). During a couple of these conversations, I clearly heard Richard Pritchard whispering what to say to me, but she denied his presence there. Anyway, they provided us with a long list of excuses on why they had to delay the work: the truck broke, somebody broke in their workshop and stole their equipment, and others excuses often contradicted by their own crew. The only real delay we could clearly see was due to the smoke hazard in mid September (one week out of five months).
To cut the long story short, September passed by, October passed by, November passed by, December passed by. Many calls, many emails, the majority of them answered. Time to time, somebody showed up to do something for a couple of hours and then nothing for days or even weeks. We talked with a lawyer about this situation, but unfortunately the kind of contract we naively signed gives us very little or no protection.
The wall of the pool was completed in October. The deck was poured in November. The final touch on an overall bad work was on December 21st, 2020 when they finally came to seal the concrete deck: the (colored) sealant was applied ununiformly with large uncovered patches. They also left the site to clean: pieces of scrap wood used for the forms, wood pallets of the cinder blocks used for the wall, some buckets and, very dangerous, nails, screws and sharp pieces of rebars all over. We have tried to reach them since December 22th, to come a fix the sealing and clean the site: no one has got back to us. We had to clean the site ourselves as it was extremely dangerous for our children.
No need to reiterate our profound frustration: months of wait and struggle, a poorly executed work that we need to fix, and a backyard to clean.
Avoid Pritchard Constructions at all costs!