House & Building Engineering

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Roy showed up on time and was very helpful and patient in explaining everything. For our kitchen renovation, we wanted to remove the wall between kitchen and dining room and were hoping it was not load bearing. Roy determined that it did carry the load of a second floor wall and thus needed to be replaced with columns and an LVL beam. Roy drew up specifications for our contractor and gave a few different options to minimize impact to the kitchen design. He was responsive to follow-up questions from both me and the contractor. Highly recommended!

I called Roy on the recommendation of a trusted colleague of mine. He was willing to discuss at length the possible issues regarding the structural stability of the beam over the phone, even before we had agreed to hire his services. When we eventually had him come to our house, he came right on time, and was extremely patient, thorough, and explained things in an analytical manner. He designed a plan for the repair of the structural beam. Most importantly, he also discovered that the wall in question was partially load bearing, even though two previous contractors had come to the conclusion that it was not. Importantly, although it ran parallel to the floor joists (suggesting that it was not load bearing), the second story had a wall directly on top of it, so it was supporting another wall. Therefore, it needed to be reinforced by a new beam after its removal, contrary to what the contractors were planning to do. He was willing to discuss the issues with the contractors by telephone, and helped them to design a structural-engineer-approved solution. Thanks very much, Roy!

Mr. Kim arrived on time and was well prepared for the job. He is very informative, ensuring you are completely satisfied with his work. He took the time to explain everything he was looking at and the pros and cons of the implementation. I hired Mr. Kim to review a house in framing and would recommend his services to anyone who thinks they may need it.

I called just after 8 a.m. and Mr. Kim answered the phone. I explained our situation to him. He explained that yes, the retaining wall is a "structure" and is exactly the kind of thing his company does evaluate. He asked me some questions about the retaining wall. Then he spent ten minutes explaining to me in layman terms the structural soundness of the retaining wall, how it would fail, slowly over time, not catastrophically over night. Based on the information I gave him he gave me a life expectancy for the wall that he felt fairly comfortable with sharing. If I wanted him to come see the wall he would gladly get out there within 24 hours. But suggested that I wait and contact him when we go to rebuild the wall. I thanked him so much for his time and great information. And we will call him when we do need to rebuild the wall.

He basically wrote us up an assessment and evaluation of the structure. We just wanted to know what kind of load it could hold and what its structural integrity is. We park two cars on it and we don?t know how old it is. He spent four hours going over it and he prepared a pretty nice evaluation for us.

We spoke on the phone to set up a time. He arrived right on time and spent about one hour looking at the areas in question. He took measurements, asked questions, made sketches, explained what he was looking for, etc. He was so informative and thorough and clearly explained everything. He taught me so much about how our house was built and things to watch for and gave me tips for ongoing maintenance of the coal cellar and front porch floor. He explained that he will work up an actual plan for us to remedy some structural issues in the basement and will submit a report to us within a week. The report will include an invoice for his time. I didn't pay anything during the first visit.

Mr. Kim did and excellent job. He did a very thorough inspection of my problem (step cracks in brick). Explained what the problem was and how to correct. He recommended reputable contractors to do the job and gave me a budgetary estimate of what the repairs would cost. Provided a complete written report as well.

Mr. Kim explained what he was doing, the relative seriousness of the problems and pros and cons of various solutions.

Roy was fantastic! Extremely friendly, willing to meet after business hours, he stayed until he had the data he needed and our questions were exhausted. We received the complete writeup for both projects approximately a week later.

He showed up on time and was able to evaluate the load bearing wall and discuss possible ways to modify the structure. After agreeing on a method he went back to his office and completed drawing up the modifications officially and mailed me the plans the same day.

He's been in business a very long time, and just started his own business. His prices are comparable to others. He is very pleasant, respectful and a nice person to work with. His work was like a textbook drawing, extremely detailed!