Bear Claw Construction

Our house backs up to the river and the previous owners never built the stairs and dock to allow river access.  We hired Bear Claw Construction to build the stairs down and my husband and his friend were building the dock to connect.  The slope down to the river is 45 degrees and the hill itself is about 45 feet long.

Bear Claw did a solid job in terms of the stability of the stairs.  I am not worried about them falling down in two or three years.  However, they workmanship was less than professional.

• they did not drill holes so multiple boards split
• they corrected errors with glue rather than replacement lumber
• they did not pour footings square so had to compensate with use of boards between some footings and the stairs
  • we ran a string down the slope against what they had done and it was obvious that they had not done a professional job of even running the string so that they could pour the footings in a straight line down the hill

My husband was not home when they finished and I told them that we would review together and contact them with any questions or concerns.  When they came back out, we showed them the issues and they kept saying that it was solid construction (we had no argument there) and that we were only concerned with aesthetics.  I explained to them that my husband and his buddy could have built sturdy stairs by themselves.  We hired professionals because we wanted quality in both stability and appearance.

After two return visits to our property and after I walked them over to the neighbor's stairs to show what we thought was quality construction, they agreed to make changes to improve the look.  They were not going to repour the footings, but they were going to fix some of the boards and other issues.  When they arrived to fix the stairs, they continued talking about how we were very concerned with aesthetics.  At that point, we decided that we would rather fix it ourselves than to deal with them any longer.  We asked them to leave, so in all fairness, we did not ever see what they would have been able to do to correct the issues that we had with their workmanship.  Also, they were never loud, rude or disrespectful.

The owner mentioned several times that she had given us a great price.  In retrospect, I would have rather paid more and gotten quality.