Charlie Knapp Builders Inc

Charlie Knapp has a good reputation. His group was very slow and we ended up not using him because he couldn't get back to us in a timely fashion. Had we more time, he probably would have worked out.

It was a very poor experience. They need to improve their communication skills and quality of work. They represented themselves as being very open to the pricing and that they are measuring all the details of the pricing and everything but I found out from experience that what happens is that they do not do a lot of comparison on the pricing and bid of their subcontractors. As a result, their subcontractors charge quite a bit and so you are not getting the best price. Their subcontractors will over-bid in materials and the materials get returned back and so the contractors get the returns and the dollars and the homeowners are not aware of it and it does not get passed back to them.

This was a very small job but because of the weight of the mirror, my wife and I could not do ourselves. Charlie Knapp Builders agreed to come out and do the work and just charge us an hourly rate. Employee showed up on time and diagnosed the problem which was different than my assumptions. He took down the mirror, reinstalled the mounting brackets making sure they went into the studs and then rehung the mirror using special mirror adhesive. The entire job took a little less than an hour and he cleaned up the space when he was through.

It was fine and he's one of my former students. He gave me a nice estimate but I didn't want to put the money into it at that point of time.

We believed that we could trust Knapp to carry out a time and materials deal with integrity, and we were not disappointed. In particular, everyone who worked on the job worked efficiently, and financial record-keeping was well-done. Also, Knapp does not mark up the price of materials and supplies, so we paid what they paid.
Knapp seems to rely on a standard list of subs, although they were willing to substitute one that we wanted for the
concrete finishing work. It seems the subs are generally reliable and do good work.
Once the project started, it proceeded about as rapidly as it could have. There were very few days lost to the press of other jobs.
Charlie Knapp was personally involved only at the planning and initial framing stages. He seems to be committed to doing
things right. His carpenters seemed similarly committed, and were a pleasure to work with. We interacted with them pretty much at every stage of the job, to decide on little details, such as how to adjust the wall placements once it was determined that the foundations had not been poured in exactly the right dimensions.
Project management, however, was generally frustrating. The carpenters were not given accurate plans to work from, which resulted in some incorrect closet sizes, and a new wall that did not line up corectly with an existing wall. The floor joists were ordered in the wrong size. The dumpster did not show up for a month. When it started to rain into our existing home because the junction between the new roof and the old roof was opened up but not covered with plastic over the weekend, there was no response to our request for help. (We ended up having to fix the problem ourselves.) They couldn't figure out how to find a replacement for a broken outdoor lamp globe, so we had to do the research and order the globe ourselves. The tiles in the bathroom were not cleaned properly after the grout was laid in, and when we told them that there was a problem with urethane haze that was making the tiles really ugly dull brown all over, the response was and quot;It will probably wear off over timeand quot;.
So, our experience was mixed. Most of the work was done quite well, and we are very happy with the end product. But there was too much need for us to do project management in order to prevent bad results, and that is not something we would want to do again. On the other hand, Knapp did much better than the builder we hired to do the original structure, so you could do worse if you are looking to build a house. After all, in the end, we did get a good job in a complex project.

.They did a great job. They started when they said they would. The work was done quick. They cleaned up when they were done.