Lundberg Builders Inc

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We are still waiting for the floor in our bathroom which is to have heated floors to be fixed. Design for front entryway was poorly designed and floods the front of our home. Used them over 17 years for over $3,000,000 of projects. They were quite good on the first projects, but were less than I would want as a builder for the last project. Never again....$1,000,000

We were hesitant at first to use Lundberg Builders and now I wish I would have listen to my instincts. We were originally given a proposal of $20,00.00 for the entire project and we easily went over budget by $20,000.00. There is not a lot of tile in the bathroom except in the shower and it is very small we even purchased the sink and vanity separately from their bill. My husband and I are both very disappointed with the way Lundberg handled their billing, charging us for hours and time that we didn't see fit. We paid ours bills but be assured we will not use Lundberg Builders for any more of our home projects. We are currently going through a kitchen renovation and chose to use another builder.

BEWARE OF LUNDBERG "BILLERS" This nightmare should have been apparent early on, but we were naive and trusting. Lundberg's cost-plus contract is written to allow him complete latitude with respect to his hourly rate employees and he ruthlessly demonstrated the dangers of that. Although we were very explicit about our budget, it was obvious from the outset with his designer (Bob Mooreland) that their game was to produce billable hours, not a finished product within an agreed upon budget. Our first bill from them was for $5000 for Mooreland's time drawing a design that we had not seen, not accepted, and did not want. We realized that he would drain our coffers if we let him randomly generate designs so we asked that he not draft anything until we had agreed upon a sound design. This proved to be folly because he would not provide rough cost estimates based on square footage. It became "Catch 22" trying to create something that could be assured of meeting our budget when we could not determine how much that something would cost. At one point, they allowed us to conceptualize, and then draft plans for a house that they later came back and said would cost more than twice what we had budgeted. Again the process was not about designing or building it was about generating bills. After months of frustration and nearly $20,000 down the drain we were still at square one and were going to walk away, but Lundberg asked for a meeting at which we made changes to the design that he said would meet the budget, so we foolishly agreed to continue with them. The building process was worse. On the promise that if we accomplished work ourselves we would see a cost savings we did much of the demolition and ground clearing, but never saw any credit for it. Anything that Lundberg had direct control over rapidly ran out of control and over budget. His supervisor's time alone exceeded the entire budgeted amount in several areas. His carpenters billed for entire days of work, yet the project dragged on and on. We were renting a house near by so it was convenient to stop in and check on the "progress'. Some days it was hard to tell that anything had been done, yet the hourly bills kept coming. With the framing barely half way done, the budget for that area had already been exausted. Strangely though, the subs (electrical, foundation, plumbing...) not working directly for Lundberg were essentially on budget. When questioned about why his bills we were so far off the mark, we were told that it was due to front-loaded costs, such as building materials and that it would even out in the end. as mentioned earlier we repeatedly asked for explanations and proposals for resolution, but none came. At Lundberg's suggestion we began to withhold money for his overbilling, while cointinuing to pay the subs. After exausting all options and finally accepting that we had been played, we had to fire them. I suspect Lundberg not only expected this but planned for it. In our opinion the idea to withold payment to him was another stall tactic used to keep him on the job so that he could continue to get his cut of the subs work. Shortly after being fired his attorney filed for a mechanics lein for the money we had withheld. That whole legal process was an even bigger nightmare, but it all would have been avoided if we'd gone with our instinct regarding the open-ended contract, or acted on the signs that were abundant early and not gotten involved with Lundberg or terminated them early on. We have learned some valuable lessons from this ordeal, the most important of which being never get involved with Lundberg Builders.