HARVARD HEIGHTS CONSTRUCTION

"We met the owner and re-did a design he got off the internet for a small efficiency apartment he was building for his mother in the back yard of his home. We came up with several great ideas and other ways to save money and make a nicer, more spacious home for his mom. One example of saving him money was to leave an existing slab from his demo-ed carport, and put the new building on blocks, on top of that slab instead of pouring another one. This saved a lot of money. From the beginning he kept asking if he could pay more to have the job move faster, however I kept explaining that there would always be delays, scheduling conflicts and of course problems with the City of Houston, and there is no way of moving any faster. I also kept mentioning that, because with us you pay after each phase of construction, my motivation was for things to move along as soon as possible, so I would get another check. Because this client was unemployed and at home all the time we could not seem to do anything fast enough for him. Why would we want to “sandbag” the job? He was at the job almost all day every day. The failures mentioned are petty, the piers he mentioned where straight with his property line, however the existing slab we put them on was not straight, we had to touch up some sheetrock blemishes (like all jobs) we video taped the framing, and mechanical trades before sheetrocking and found a smoke detector missing. Of course we fixed it. He bought the cheap un-assembled cabinets form Ikea, that everybody likes in the store, but later they hate them, and we got blamed for a City inspector misplacing a green tag for the leak test. About the stairs, I had an idea to find some concrete stairs instead of wood stairs, because they would look nicer and last much longer. I could not find any that met code, and then we went with the wooden stairs per the original contract. It was no big deal and the job was not held up. Another time we staged a few boards to be returned along with the leftovers from his job, maybe another ten percent, it again was no big deal. If he would have mentioned a party, or we would have cleared everything away. This client not only thinks we deliver poor quality work, he bashes all the “Houston area contractors” overall. I guess we are the best of the worst in Houston. But what I really am upset about is that when I see him at Kroger (the local grocery store) he says his mom likes her new place and everything is okay Why doesn’t he say what he really thinks, and why didn’t he fire us during the construction?"