HP Construction

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Patrick Poland at HP has been a strong collaborator on what turned out to be a challenging project. We had just purchased a cottage when the winter cold and some creative workarounds by the prior owner of the cottage had us dealing with burst pipes that ran water for a couple of weeks in January before we figured it out. Not good. Patrick showed up an hour after I called and sized up the situation in ways that made sense to me, both in terms of damage repair and preventative repair so that we wouldn?t have the issue again.
This has been an expensive endeavor, but you know how it goes when you open up an old structure with the intent of just fixing one
thing: like pulling on a thread only to unravel a sweater. The house had been neglected for some years, and opening up the walls revealed a series of issues?mold, rusting galvanized pipes, ungrounded electrical, etc?that needed to be dealt with.
I found Patrick to be highly professional and good at the business end of this: He handled the insurance claim?something I?ve never done?professionally and effectively and in ways that materially offset the cost of fixing our disaster. He scoped the work accurately, responded strategically to the unforeseeable, and his invoices have been as unsurprising and as promised.
My experience is that Patrick is a hands-on manager who exercises a great deal of oversight of his workers. He attended to small details in work that other contractors would have let go. He?s got a stable of quality tradesmen?our project required nearly every trade?who seem to appreciate working with him. In general, I saw Patrick hold his workers to high standards: they clean up as they go, minimize their impact on the rest of the house and don?t leave cigarette butts or soda cans lying around.
But here?s what I really enjoy about Patrick: He?s a creative problem-solver who brought good ideas to our ever-unraveling house situation. He?s informed and curious about new materials and products, so that his work has a thoughtfulness and detail to it that is significantly better than others I?ve used. I also found Patrick to be a systems-thinker, solving for the plumbing, electrical, mold, outside water and structural issues together, rather than one at a time in that way that often leads to compromises or workarounds. Once I figured this out, it reduced my stress level considerably.
Lastly, and this was important to me, I felt like Patrick was in the project with me, thinking through aesthetic details and larger functional issues as if he was going to be living with the work. More than once Patrick called me after a planning session to propose alternative solutions to something that had been bothering him. I benefited from this kind of continuous refinement on a project
that included demoing the bathroom, kitchen, replacing all the plumbing, all the floors, rewiring much of the electrical, relocating the water heater, and rebuilding the place after all of this.
And the work? It?s really, really good. The bathroom, in particular, is a work of art. I've worked with top quality contractors on my main house in Chicago, and Patrick's work is right up there with them. In fact, I wished he traveled!