Owings & Aeschlimann LLC

My wife and I have had some experience with general contractors from prior work. We worked with a G.C. to build a 4500 square foot house, and another contractor to do a 2000 square foot au pair suite/basement finish job. Our work with O&A was not typical of our previous experiences with other GCs. There were many problems. Only the most serious ones are noted here: 1. They got the job because of their competitive pricing, but in the end cost us more than the most expensive bid. Their quote for the job was artificially low, and some of the subcontractors told us that they were instructed to give bids that they knew were too low. 2. They did a great job at the start, but things started to go downhill about half way through, when they took on a second job. Progress on our project slowed down dramatically, and they took 4 months longer than our contract stipulated. They actually never finished some parts, and we could not get them back to complete them. They essentially abandoned the job. 3. Their accounting was a bit loose. We had items delivered to our job site that we did not need. We often were told that these items were for a different job, but we found costs for these items on our account, and we had to request that our account be reimbursed. We were also charged for work for which we were never invoiced and then had to fight to obtain the invoice. 4. Some of their subcontractors were excellent, some were not. A few of these subcontractors frankly performed substandard work. Other subcontractors simply ignored what they were told to do. When they were asked to come back to correct problems, they took weeks. In the end, what was finished was decent, but the road to getting there was overbudget, overdue and unpleasant.

This contractor is known as O&A, Owings & Aeschlimann or Tom and Roy, O&A was horrible and I can only hope that none of my neighbors ever use their services. Tom and Roy portray themselves as professionals but they are quite the opposite. In brief, there were many things that went wrong on this project but the top three: 1. O&A purposely submitted their proposal using materials that were out of spec and were the low bidder; the cost of the actual materials was 100% higher in some cases. They won the bid process against honest contractors on price but ended up higher priced than everyone else. 2. O&A left the job site during construction to start and finish another job. No work was completed, and our home was left in a state of chaos, for over two weeks while they worked on another job. This action made it impossible for the job to be completed on time. 3. O&A returned briefly to the job, but never completed it. They took another job across the street and completed that one while we hired another contractor to complete their unfinished work. Again, I can only hope none of my neighbors ever use their services. These two people are very dishonest. Regretfully.