We hired Ryan/RWK to do a basement finish for us about 9 months ago. Needless to say it was not a pleasant experience and is one of the worst and most expensive contractor/construction mistake we have ever made.
During the project RWK would schedule subs to come and go as they pleased making the provided schedule completely inaccurate. Many of the subs used our front door and went up and down our main stairs tracking in dirt, leaving the front door open (middle of winter) instead of using the large basement windows so we had very little privacy or input on any of the scheduling.
Our house was disgustingly dirty throughout the 6 months because the basement was rarely cleaned. There was enough dust/dirt/debris that our home's fire alarms would go off when the heater would kick on...even in the middle of the night. We discussed the problem with Ryan/RWK and they told us they would get to it, they never did...after several weeks of this issue I finally grabbed the kids and wife and we rolled up our sleeves and went down and cleaned it ourselves, which surprise surprise caused the fire alarms to stop going off. After that point, we just kept cleaning the site to avoid the alarms going off again. RWK never addressed the problem.
During that time our heater actually turned itself off in the middle of December, RWK said it wasn't their fault, but the 3rd party HVAC company said that our heater had been stressed to the point of failure due to the unclean surroundings...that's what gave us the idea to clean for the fire alarms.
The project suffered massive delays due to poor scheduling, and poor communication. We ended up having to take days off work in an emergency fashion to go pick things out to keep additional delays from occurring.
Some of the work done was bad enough that even we would find the poor workmanship and quality while just walking around the recently completed work at/that night.
An example of our experience: that picture of a deep hole in the concrete floor the only reason it was repaired was because the city inspector came out and even though it wasn't what he was inspecting, he made a specific note about it as it was big enough to start caving and expanding. Until that point RWK told us it was fine and didn't need to be addressed...they caused it when jackhammering for plumbing.
Even with all this going on, the heavy delays, the miscommunications, the poor scheduling RWK never offered anything more than a "Sorry". They did not try to make up for the delays/poor quality workmanship by doing anything extra for us, or even discounting the price of the project. Because our contract did not include anything about penalties resulting in delays or issues in poor workmanship we were charged close to full price of around $60k. In fact, at closing Ryan actually tried to charge us full price for cleaning.
Our latest challenge is 2-3 months after the work has been completed we are having issues getting repairs under the 1 year warranty RWK provided as part of our contract. Any scheduled work thus far has always been very slow and usually requires multiple times contacting Ryan to keep things moving.
Who knows, maybe this is all our fault, we had hoped for trust and professionalism, and maybe we were too uninformed so RWK got relaxed and figured they could just slip things by us. Included are some pictures of a few problems we documented with RWK along the way.
Should have taken longer and looked closer at some of the other contractors like Salt, whom we got a bid from, but liked Ryan's sales pitch more. Guess we'll chalk it up as a very expensive learning experience.
Hopefully this helps you learn from our mistakes. read more