When I was ready to finish my basement, I called a couple of contractors that 2 were recommended by…read morefriends (after checking out both of their basements, which both looked great.)
The "quality player":
I quickly discovered that the player that I had expected to be the high cost/high quality was a huge pain to work with (many meetings, unwillingness to give me pricing in writing, forgetting about details we'd discussed, etc.) so I had no confidence in their ability to do the job at the agreed upon price within the agreed upon time frame.
The "cost" player:
The good news is that they made it very easy for me to go with Mike L and the Basement Company. He produced great designs, had creative ideas, and alerted me to things to think about when they were cheap & easy to do, instead of having to fix problems later (like add baseboard heaters to basement bedrooms because it can get cold down there and we want our guests to be comfortable).
I'm a worrier and a perfectionist (plus a little paranoid about getting hosed by a contractor) and I work from home so I kept watching for something to go wrong, but it never did. On time, on budget, as-promised, with every detail addressed. If something concerned me, I called Mike and it was sorted out easily. When they were close to finished, Mike came over and started marking every imperfection with blue tape. He found LOADS of little things that we never would have noticed. All of the things he spotted were fixed in no time. I was concerned that we would need to haggle over a 'punch list' of things that we wanted him to complete, but it never came to that.
All of the workers were professional, kind (remembered my kids's names and even let my boys help a little, when appropriate) and everything was spotless every day! (No dumpster outside, no overflowing garbage cans, no junk in the work area, no dust filling the upstairs, no nasty port-a-potty to annoy my neighbors, etc.).
Since my wife and I both work at home (which is part of the reason we wanted to add another office), we were able to watch over a lot of the work, but if I were to do it again someday I would have enough confidence in Mike to just write him a check and stay out of the process until he was done.
Mike's a great guy, he's got a great team (not random contractors that come and go...they are people that have worked together for years), he's got his process down (simple, transparent, predictable), plus he was significantly less expensive than his competition.
I recommend the Basement Company so enthusiastically that when I saw that they weren't on Yelp, I created an entry for them (I've never done that for anyone before!).
