Goeden Construction Services

A major problem throughout the project seems to have been that effective onsite management and significant owner participation seemed to be non-existent except for what appeared to be the purpose of cost containment to maximize profits. While reproofing the garage Goeden?s employees nearly dropped my garage to the ground due to what appeared to have been inexperienced unsupervised transient labor cutting the through load bearing supports. The resulting near collapse leaves one wall bowed out to this day. At this point the lending institution, the people who selected this contractor as the lowest bidder, had no one involved who was experienced in construction standards to be in a position to exercise effective oversight or effect remediation. Dealing with my disability left me at a real disadvantage in protecting myself and my home from what presented as this provider?s functional business model. The damage done and shoddy patchwork on the internal support structure of the garage was so bad I had to bring another contractor in to repair and reinforce it at additional expense. My expense. I returned home one day from therapy during the project and entered the kitchen to witness a general laborer working on my kitchen wiring using a picture from a magazine as a guide. 2 GFI's had been installed behind my refrigerator and another was deconstructed beyond recognition. When I asked another worker what this guy was doing working on my wiring I was told he was trying to ?move up?. A licensed electrician had to be brought in to redo and complete the wiring work up to code standards. I never knew with any certainty when or if there would be workers at and in my house on several of the many days the project took. When I was told anything, several times it was that other projects had taken precedence. After Goedens installed the upstairs prefab shower unit, water still does not drain completely from shower floor due to drain cover being raised above, not recessed to, the shower deck. A perfectly good antique commode was cracked from a laborer over torqueing the mounting bolts with an oversized crescent wrench. Such practices and standards were prevalent throughout the project. The downstairs bathroom was not brought to handicap accessible state as I need because Goeden?s started the upstairs bath first. Then, citing undisclosed work being responsible for cost overruns, convinced an employee of the financing institution that remodeling the downstairs bath to be handicap accessible could not be done on budget: This would be the budget created by the lowest bid that Goeden Construction submitted after surveying the tasks to be included in the bid. I was forced to accept this to get at least the upstairs bath restored to usable. Now my only handicap accessible bathing is up 13 steps. The cost overruns cited were most likely due more to the labor expense from all the unsupervised work that had to be redone, often repeatedly, in most, if not all, areas of the project. I voice recorded the walk through I conducted with each contractor who bid this job to insure each was given the same basis for their bids. There was no lack of disclosure. I used a voice recorder and photography to record what I could throughout the time Goeden Construction was on my property. The back yard around the wheelchair ramp installation, which also did not pass initial county inspections, was never restored to original condition after construction damage. I was told I had to go down to the county auditors and pay for a permit that should have been paid for by the provider. Goeden laborers ruined some lawn furniture and packed a variety of my personal tools up and left with them over the course of the contract. What little restoration that was done and the cleanup of scrap concrete was only done, as I recall, after threat of withholding a scheduled payment. The personal possessions were never found but finally replaced with items of similar quality and I was finally reimbursed for the permit I was duped into paying for. Representative of the work ethic I was becoming familiar with, a Goeden principal was in the process of painting over a nail protruding through a doorjamb and had to be told to remove the nail and patch the hole. The front door was not properly weather sealed. Over the winter and this spring soffit panels were falling off the eves of the house. None bore the fastener marks that would have been there if they had been secured as I recall being informed they would be to accommodate my challenges with squirrels. Goeden?s did send 2 workers, who arrived unannounced, to replace the panels. Almost all aspects of Goeden's work required multiple efforts to either pass county inspections or demonstrate integrity for intended use. And there were many more challenges with subcontractors, spot transient labor and an overwhelming lack of worksite management by Goeden?s who seemed to pay more attention to their profits than quality of work and customer care. I would not advise this contractor to anyone who wasn't already familiar with building Best Practices, who couldn't be available to supervise it's workers whenever they did show up on site and couldn?t defend themselves from what I experienced.

They did a very bad job. Unfortunately, we went backwards. They came in and assured me that they could care for my floors. And they did a really sloppy job. My floors were trashed. It was about 20 hours of clean-up after they were gone. Things weren't sanded. They weren't right. It was just a real, total mess. They came back yesterday to supposedly fix the work they had done. They just ran beads of caulk down through long areas instead of really fixing the problems. It was very discouraging. They were $1,200 higher than any other bid I got for the job.