Poulin Design Remodeling

Overview: About $16,500 (plus customer-supplied toilet) to rebuild a guest bathroom that had been demolished to the support beams (except for two in-wall medicine cabinets and the large mirror between them) in the course of mold remediation. Design process: excellent. Contract negotiations: unreasonably stressful. Installation: Seemed competent at time of walk-through and final payment, but turned out to take another 6 weeks to get a fully functional bathroom. Initial signing of contract: mid-January. Walk-through and final payment: mid-March. Actual completion of project (delivery of a fully functional bathroom): end of April. The experience: Other than sticker shock, the process of choosing materials and having Ruben come up with a design was as stress-free as we could hope for. It was the showroom, with samples of all the materials available for viewing side-by-side and Ruben's assembling of those materials and guidance in picking ones that went together well that “sold” us on hiring Poulin. (We could have had a general contractor install materials we chose locally for about a third of Poulin's price.) The contract “negotiations” were another matter, given the many provisions of the form “We're not responsible for damages or accidents, even if we caused them” and the incoherence of some of the text – e.g., an incomplete sentence of the form “If certain conditions are met, the customer may.” (No indication of what the customer may do if those conditions are met.) We canceled the project when Poulin insisted on no changes to the contract “boilerplate”, but a few days later the owner sent a message agreeing to at least complete that sentence. (All of our contacts with the owner were through underlings except for a two-minute appearance to sign the contract and invite us to call him with any questions, as did the “Welcome letter”. None of our 3 or 4 calls were ever answered.) Once we had signed, Josh came out to take final, more precise measurements and then gave us a tentative timetable for the project. There was a long wait (of which we were forewarned) for materials to be manufactured or ordered and gathered together at the Poulin showroom. When the materials came in sooner than expected, we were able to start the installation almost a week earlier than the initial, tentative start date. We were a little surprised that the installation staff consisted of one person (except for the morning that the countertop for the double vanity had to be carried up the stairs and maneuvered into place), but Lawrence worked diligently and was good about letting us know when he would (and would not) be there. Initially he would work until 3:30 or 4, but as a deadline we didn't realize had been set approached, he put in a couple of 8:30 nights, including the last one. That time pressure had, I believe, a lot to do with a few mistakes made along the way: (1) Installing the vanity a couple of inches off-center, relative to the two medicine cabinets we were keeping. (This mistake was caught and corrected, but at the cost of about a day's work.) (2) Not checking whether the drain pipe beyond the tee junction where the drains from the two sinks came together was clear before blocking access to that tee junction behind the vanity. (This, too, was caught, and Poulin even absorbed the cost of having one of their contracted plumbers diagnose the problem, though the proposed solution – getting to the tee junction by cutting through the wall of the adjoining master bedroom at a cost of about $700 – led us to instead hire a drain-clearing specialist to work his snake into the clog from one of the sink drains, at a cost of about $200. Apparently the main drain pipe had dried out enough during the months it had stood idle while mold remediation and bathroom rebuild were conducted that flakes of rust had broken off and clumped together to form a clog.) (3) Not testing the shower/tub showerhead/spout connections before completing the shower/tub enclosure around them. As it later turned out, the last section of pipe leading to the spout was installed backwards, so it didn't seal properly, and the plastic disk that was supposed to close off the route to the tub when the diverter lever was raised was broken and no longer attached to the diverter lever. These problems were not caught – or were not acknowledged – until after the rather rushed walk-through the last night of Lawrence's scheduled time with us and until after we had given an on-the-spot, highly positive rating of Lawrence's work and made our final payment. (We learned that Lawrence was scheduled to begin another project the following morning.) During the walk-through I noticed that the showerhead continued to drip fairly heavily after the diverter was lowered to the fully down/off position, but was told and agreed that it probably just took a while for water to drain down from the showerhead. But when I attempted my first bath in the tub the following night, water ran through the showerhead at considerable volume the whole time. When we notified Lawrence of the problem, he said that he would be out before the end of the week to fix it, but had a family crisis come up that prevented that. He said to call him when we got back to town (after about a week away) to set up a time for him to come out to correct the problem. However, when we did get back to town and call about the needed repair, there ensued a 5-week odyssey involving a two-week wait (during which time Josh would never give us a specific date for Lawrence's return) for Lawrence to put in most of a day correcting the backwards section of pipe, only to discover that the diverter disk was broken; a new spout assembly had to be ordered from Delta; the replacement spout didn't work, either – possibly because of the new installer's attempt to salvage parts of the old assembly; a third spout was ordered and fitted and worked perfectly. Fortunately this was a guest bathroom with no guests scheduled to arrive anytime soon, so the long road to getting a fully functional bathroom wasn't a major problem, though it was inconvenient to schedule other activities around. And we're quite pleased with the final result. Recommendations to PDR: Schedule more time for installation. (The next project can always be moved up if this one finishes sooner than scheduled.) Train installers in catalog products that aren't Rebath (e.g., Delta faucets). It shouldn't take 3 spouts to get it right. Finally, don't invite clients to call the owner with any problems concerns if he isn't going to answer those calls. Recommendations to potential customers: Don't hire Poulin if you can't do without use of the bathroom (or other facility) for a few months, or if you're confident about putting together, on your own, materials (flooring, tub, vanity, countertop, etc.) that go together well. But if you have the out-of-service time to spare and really need design help, Poulin's showroom and their sales staff are a great asset. (This is, after all, Poulin Design Center.)

Excellent - End result is exactly what I envisioned. The designer guided me through all choices and helped with selections. Project coordinator on site was very good - experienced, professional, knowledgeable and easy to work with. Project was on a deadline and was completed on time. All work performed by the coordinator and the subs was of very good quality and done efficiently, professionally and courteously. All work performed each day was cleaned up. Very pleased with the work and quality of products.

Quality ranged from professional to DIY.  Very inconsistent.

Two yr. warranty does not help when some mistakes can only be fixed by completely tearing out and redoing the work.

 Once a defective tile is installed, taking it out will probably damage something else.  If floor tile is set without sliding a level around to check for raised corners, there is not much you can do about it, even the next week.

The wall for the sliding “barn door” was not built flat, so the door track cannot be secured flat against a curved wall. 

 Everyone, including managers, say they are over worked.  That is the result of poor upper management. 

 Sometimes workers would show up hours later than was promised.  Other times, they would show up on a day no one was expected.  The project started July 6, 2015 and the last work was done Oct 1, 2015.  I do not like to give unfavorable reviews and that is why I have waited so long to do this.  Overall we are glad we did the remodeling and are enjoying the upgrade.  However, we paid top dollar for professional work, and far to much of the work was done at less quality than I could have done.

All of the people are nice people.  We got along with everyone.  Fortunately, I caught dozens of the mistakes in time for them to be corrected.  All of us who have done work like this know that you must sometimes use a bit of force to get a piece into position.  We also know that to persuade a board into position, you use a rubber mallet and not a metal hammer that will dent the board.  Many times, I asked a worker to STOP!, while I ran to my tool shed for a rubber mallet.  How could a professional not have a rubber mallet in his tool box?

We paid $3,000.00 for a very fancy high grade "barn" door and track.  It is beautiful and works great with soft close at each end.  However, the track sticks out from the wall at one end because the wall they built was not flat.  

In 2014 we had the same company remodel our kitchen.  Overall they did a good job on the kitchen.  However, there were some glaring mistakes.  We were promised these would be fixed when we did the bathrooms.  To accommodate this we ordered the same finish for the guest bath cabinets as the kitchen cabinets so they could easily order the moldings that would help fix the kitchen problems.  They never ordered those extra mouldings and they never offered to fix the problems even though we kept reminding the supervisor of the problem.  The supervisor was regularly promising things that he never did.  

Finally, you should know they will not breakdown their quote.  You will not know how much you are paying for the faucets or the cabinets or the labor.  They might tell you they are giving you a discount, but since you never see any individual costs, you do not know.  

They are the largest remodeling company in Albuquerque, but I cannot recommend them and will never use them again.