We recently had Schroeder replace our old sun porch with a 4-season room, and overall we are very…read morepleased with both the process and the end result.
During the design phase, the architect, Jessica, was incredibly helpful and responsive to our questions and concerns. We also threw in a curveball only a couple of weeks before the planned start date when we asked them if they could add a basement room underneath the new room; the original plan had been to have just a crawl space. They rolled with it and amended the plans and permits in record time.
When we had trouble coming up with how we wanted to use the new room, we met with Jessica again and she had a great suggestion that we ended up going with: make it our living room rather than a home office as we'd planned, and turn our existing living room into an office, with a wall and door added to create an entryway separating it from the front door.
Despite all the last-minute changes, they started on schedule and completed the bulk of the work in about 3 months, including several unrelated add-ons we requested. There were some challenges along the way; for example, when they removed a set of sliding glass doors, the wall above them dropped a half-inch because the doors turned out to be load-bearing. But the end result is everything we hoped for and more.
During the actual building process, the project manager came to our house often to check on progress, answer questions, etc. Towards the end, the company promptly addressed any issues we had. We are very happy with the work overall. The new living room and home office look amazing, and we now have an extra basement room.
No company is perfect, however, so there were a few negatives. For instance, we had a minor flooding issue in the basement due to a hole made during the digging, and there was a painter who seemed to show up only when they felt like it. And we had some confusion over the financial side when we couldn't make a draw on our HELOC immediately due to the invoice being issued during the holidays when it was impossible to schedule the required inspection, and the Schroeder folks kept on calling us about it despite our telling them there wasn't much we could do to force the bank to release the funds given the timing.
However, all of these issues were resolved, nothing was damaged by the water that got into the basement, and the project was completed on schedule. We tend to judge a company not on whether there are problems (because that's almost inevitable, especially with a large renovation project), but on how they handle such issues when they arise. Schroeder was responsive to our questions and concerns, and we would absolutely work with them again; in fact, we plan to hire them when we get to the next update we want to do in our home, probably in another couple of years.
