Bell Remodeling and Construction

When I decided to do an overall renovation on my house, I contacted Bell Remodeling and Construction right away and as usual they never fail to exceed my expectations. I can see the teamwork that makes the result professional, efficient and excellence. They are also good in giving you updates on the work progress and transparent with any issues they encounter. They always provide an excellent work and the team will always be with you from start until you are satisfied with the result you see.

I have so many negative things to say about Bell Remodeling that I do not even know where to start, so I will go in chronological order and keep it simple. This is strictly from my experience, and I hope it helps in making your decision if you should go with them or not. -Edgar and his business partner met with me in mid July to discuss a project involving building. an addition of a sunroom and laundry room that was to add a total of 390 sqft. -At the end of July we signed the contract and Edgar projected a completion date of end of October. Specified that it could give or take a couple of weeks based on the City's permitting process. I was okay with it as long he adhered to my once a week communication update. -In mid August one of his workers came out to take measurements of the property. Since it was only him, it was going to take him potentially a few hours to take and requested my assistance. The problem was that instead of having me help him for 20-30 minutes and then doing the rest himself, he had me actually help him for 2.5 hours! Later on, Edgar actually charged me for 4 hours worth of work at $100.00 an hour rate. - From mid August to the end of September, Edgar and his crew went completely silent and provided me with no updates. -Start of October. Edgar notified me that the project had to be downscaled to meet city permit requirements. Edgar provided no actual reference to what the city actually said nor reference a specific building code which after giving it much thought, it felt that they were downscaling the project to keep their costs down. My project was downscaled from 390 sq ft to 317 sq ft. This was a pretty significant drop of 16%! Edgar did not do a change over contract nor offered to adjust the price based on the drop of scale of the project. He literally kept the price the same and come to find out later, the scope of the project was even smaller than the 317 sq ft. -Thanksgiving time. I had yet to receive a start time of the project and have been kept in the dark about what was going on. I called the office and spoke with the receptionist to cancel and requested and invoice of what was expended. On the same day I cancelled, Chow Engineering called me to give me an update regarding the project status. Since I felt that they didn’t understand that I am going through with the cancellation, I decided to email Edgar on Wednesday directly notifying him that I was cancelling the contract and to please provide me invoices of all the expenditures he had made. Edgar immediately replied back with this: Hi Alex, we have a contract active and expenses have been made. You will be required to pay all expenses made up to this point. Your project engineer plans are already in the final phase at Lancaster building and safety city hall. At this point the company has invested $6,500 and a full payment is required before the contract is voided. Be advised that on Monday, December 02, our attorney will be directed to file lean for the full amount against your property. This lean will not be removed until a full payment is received. The very first action Edgar took was threaten to put a mechanic’s lien on my property for his failure on starting the project in time. At no point did I deny him payment and I was so frustrated with the lack of clear communications that it was better for me to drop the project completely. -December time frame. I considered Edgar’s legal threat and decided to double down and get an attorney to defend my property and go on the offensive. Edgar’s tune changed completely and begun to actually provide documentation of the actual expenditures he made. Several of these were ludicrous and his $6,500 dollar claim was based on him trying to pad me for profits (his actual expenditure for the project was $4100.00). -End of January. After a significant amount of communication and document verification, we settled out for the actual costs Bell remodeling expended. I eventually found out that Edgar’s company actually didn’t submit for permits until the 17th of October which was 6 days before the project needed to be completed. In order to provide a good reference, a 2k to 3k sq ft in Lancaster Ca takes approximately 5-6 months to build. Bell remodeling were in the 4th month and didn’t even have a start date nailed down, which just completely dumbfounded me. There were no materials, no mention of the stages of the project, no communications regarding house down time, no mention of what they need it from me. Edgar was also willing to just hand me the blue prints with no letter of relinquishment I am officially out of $4,100 and while I have officially own the blue prints now, I whole heartedly regret doing business with Bell Remodeling. They may be good for smaller projects but if you are looking to do additions, sunrooms, or anything larger scale, I recommend looking elsewhere. From my experience, I personally don’t think they know what they are doing and I also think that both Edgar and his business partner know building codes that well nor can they accurately guage the resources needed for a permit required project. I hope Google does not take this review down because I think people need to know who they are dealing with. I suggest you go elsewhere and avoid this headache of a company.