Jenkins Restorations

This company is a train wreck! Don’t subject yourself to the endless frustrations. Jenkins rebuilt our carport on an insurance job last year after a fire. Initially, we had good interactions with them and thought they were all really nice guys. But it wasn't long before the big problems started. The biggest was the architectural drawings of the carport, which we had asked to see before they were submitted to the city for approval. That didn’t happen – they were submitted and approved before we even saw them. When we insisted on seeing them before the framing started, we found that they were wrong! The architects (who sit on the east coast somewhere) had badly missed the mark, despite having photos of the old structure to duplicate. They had designed something weird looking and no one had noticed. We made changes to the plans in a meeting with the GC, Stan, assuming he would have the plans correctly redrawn, but he didn’t. The framers showed up with revised, but still incorrect measurements! We had to stop work to revise the plans again and still ended up with a weird looking structure that we would have modified had we been able to envision it at the beginning. Smaller problems like this occurred repeatedly over the 9-month rebuild (for a carport that was, by their own estimate, supposed to take 3 months!). Jenkins’ (mostly Stan’s) communications with us and their subcontractors were terrible. Despite repeatedly asking Stan to let us know when work was scheduled and people would be coming to the house, he rarely did. We were promised weekly updates before we signed a contract, but over the 9 months, we received about five without having to repeatedly ask. Worse was that subcontractors were given incorrect or incomplete instructions, then Stan wouldn’t check in until after big mistakes were made. For example, siders put on the wrong siding, painters didn’t complete the job, electricians mis-wired the whole structure, Stan’s own guys messed up some framing! Tons of miscommunications! We finished several details ourselves because we got tired of asking them to send someone back to get it right. There were also large time gaps between components, which we assume was due to poor planning on Stan’s part (and it’s hard to get subs in Seattle), including a many month delay getting the final concrete resurfacing done because Stan didn’t have the connections and didn’t seem to put in serious effort to complete it until we were being very vocal to our insurance company about the delays. The project dragged on seemingly forever. On top of this, Jenkins had vastly underestimated the cost of the rebuild. That didn’t affect us once we had paid our deductible, but I wouldn’t trust them to do quality work on their initial bid, even if they did do quality work.