MURRAY ENGINEERS

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When I called this company, they gave me an estimate as follows: $3000 for the soil report, $300-$700 to review plans $1400 to do observations during the construction a few hundred for a letter summarizing what they had seen during construction. What it actually cost: $2950 for the report, $765 to review plans, $3942 to observe, we didn't use them for follow up letter. The first part of the job went fine. They wrote the soil report, which they charged us $2950 for. It went pretty quickly and they were very responsive. Then they reviewed the plans - it cost $765. The cost was a little over their estimate, and it took a few days for them to get back to us, but that was all fine. We spoke with our general contractor and he said that it wouldn't be necessary to have the soil engineers observe the construction. The city didn't appear to require it either so we didn't ask the soil engineers to observe the dig. Then as we were about to fill in the hole after making the basement, the city inspector asked for soil engineers to comment on the waterproofing. Our contractor called the soil engineers. These guys didn't comment on the waterproofing, but instead they wrote a report on the condition of our job site that we felt was rather alarmist. Also, they made suggestions about drainage that we felt were conservative. We're not soil engineers, but their suggestions were more conservative than our designer, the city or our general contractor felt were necessary. Then the soil engineers insisted on watching our contractor backfill the dirt. We were OK with this, but they proceeded to spend more than 20 hours and charged us about $4000 for everything related to the observations - we didn't know it would cost so much until we got the bills. We were out of town for much of the time when they observed so we didn't know how long they were spending at the site. It was much more than the $1400 observation estimate they had given. It's hard to believe that they spent more than 20 hours watching our contractors fill in dirt. I called them and asked about what I felt was an excessive charge and they said that our contractors were not compacting the dirt correctly so that's why they had to spend so much time there. We don't know why they couldn't have done the job in less time or why they didn't inform us that it was costing so much more than the original estimate. We don't plan to do a project like this one again, but if we did we wouldn't use these soil engineers.

MURRAY & ENGINEERS PROVIDED US WITH A THOROUGH REPORT OF THEIR GEOTECHNICAL INVESTIGATION OF OUR PLANNED BASEMENT ADDITION. THEY WERE COURTEOUS & PROFESSIONAL IN PERFORMING THEIR INVESTIGATION.