Darius Construction Inc

Our remodeled bathroom is fantastic and we are 100% satisfied.  Darius was superb to work with!  He was professional, courteous, and considerate.  He was extremely helpful for the decisions we needed to make and was great at solving unanticipated problems.  We recommend Darius without reservation, and we hope to engage him in the near future to redo our kitchen.
Darius gave a very detailed estimate based on our work specifications (which we changed as the job progressed), and which he very clearly qualified as being subject to change depending on what he saw when the walls were torn down.  The tear-down revealed several unanticipated problems.  The most serious was that the old fiberglass shower hid some duct work beneath a molded seat feature.  This was the air return for our entire heating/AC system, and its placement conflicted with our plan for a flat-walled tiled shower.  Darius and Algis generated several ideas for working around this problem, and we ended up choosing the plan that rerouted the duct into our hallway, where they built a plywood enclosure to bring that duct from the floor into a corner in the hallway.  This is hard to describe in words, but the setback was pretty serious (several man-days) and the solution was very elegant (the new duct location is very attractive and blends nicely with the rest of our home).  Naturally, this major change resulted in a small adjustment to the final cost.  However, at all steps of the process Darius was perfectly clear about cost. He worked with us at every step to make sure the choices he had to make were consistent with our goals, and to make sure we knew the cost consequences of our choices.  In our experience this is always how he operates, and this is one of the reasons we keep coming back to him.  The other unexpected problems were the placement of water lines, which were incompatible with the Kohler shower base we had selected, and the placement of some electrical wiring, which cut across an area where we wanted to put some recessed medicine cabinets.  For these problems too Darius worked out solutions that made it possible for us to proceed with our original plans.
Darius has a craftsman's eye for details, a skill which added greatly to the aesthetics of our remodeled bathroom.  He shifted from 90-degree molding corners to a less abrupt transition; he crafted the transition from the wood floor to the new tile so that it is funcitonal and pleasing to the eye.
Darius was in our home essentially every day for 3 months.  We gave him a copy of our key and trusted him completely.  The workmanship was fantastic, and his solutions to the surprises behind our walls were clever and artfully executed.  Every day he laid down drop cloths and cleaned up, so his work had minimal impact on the cleanliness of our home.

Darius came and did a walk through before starting the job.  He wrote up an incredible detailed contract (16 pages) which was filled with abbreviations and descriptions that were hard to follow.  His bid came in higher than other bids, but the others were not available in our window of time.  Darius had a reputation of being a "perfectionist" and as we were on a tight schedule, we decided to go with him.  He started the work, and as he worked he would find this little area here and that area there that needed "extra" work, that were supposedly not in his original contract, even though I remember discussing them with him during the initial walk-through.  This way of doing business seemed petty and shady to me, and yet seemed to be his regular way of doing business.  I believe that the high cost of his original bid should've covered these other areas without any change orders.  He ended up charging a couple of thousand more than the original bid, and there was not much we could do about it.  There was also some lumber left over when he was finished that he had purchased for the job, and I asked him to leave it for me.  I then saw him loading much of the lumber into his truck.  He become hostile when I confronted him, and told me the wood was from a prior job.  I think he does very high quality work, but I think he has ethics problems, and I didn't appreciate being blind-sided with all of the change orders.  I would recommend bringing a tape recorder on the walk-through so there is no misunderstanding about the work scope.

Darius does the work himself and is diligent and detail-oriented in diagnosing problems and carrying out the job. For our kitchen project, he ran extensive tests on our electrical system, essentially mapping out all the circuits, before deciding that a new circuit would be needed for the recessed and pendant lights we were installing. He sealed off the kitchen and kept the house clear of the considerable drywall dust and debris during that project. We keep going back to him when we have major work because we are confident that he'll do the job right, even if it takes more time than anticipated. Before he worked on our exterior rot issue, we had at least two other handimen who essentially papered over the moisture/rot problem by installing new window framing without dealing with the underlying problems, and we later discovered that a one of the town's biggest painting outfits painted right over the problem without pointing out the problem or giving us an opportunity to get it fixed first.
In addition, when Darius is done, the work looks great. We were very happy with the kitchen ceiling lighting, and the new windows and repaired wall. He's only contractor we've used that I'd give my unqualified endorsement!