Typically the scope of our project was considered a small contract, for many kitchen and bathroom contractors, so it took several months to get reliable responses from contractors for estimates. We contacted many personally-recommended contractors, and contractors known through my field of work. None of them panned out as reliable sources, so I then took the search to Angie's List, where I immediately noticed IRC Tile Service's excellent ratings and reviews. I contacted and met with David, the owner of IRC for an estimate and to discuss the damages and needed repairs to the shower. It was immediately clear to me that he and his team would be the most responsible bidder. His estimate was comparable to other contractors, but it was not the lowest bid, nor the highest. What initially impressed me the most about David was his intent to listen to the various investigations I had already undertaken in an attempt to assess the shower failure. Due to the difficulties I had in getting Contractors to respond to my correspondence (all before going with Angie's List) this amounted to a lot of research, trial and error to diagnose the issue. Rather than taking the approach of trying to tell, he listened to my knowledge of the situation as a potential customer which helped immediately and served as an indicator to me that a working relationship with IRC Tile Service could be one of collaboration, rather than confrontation or miscommunication. Additionally, I was impressed with how David made clear his standards of quality and professionalism. I think it's easy at the time of an estimate meet-up, for someone seeking a contractor's help for a repair-based job to end up feeling as though they're not being heard, or that they're being told what they want to hear – that the project can be done quickly and inexpensively. Sometimes, that's simply not the best course of action. The most telling example of this was that he was unwilling to warrantee a partial re-build of our shower. The project went extremely well. David's team was very professional, consulted, and collaborated with me at every major moment in the project. The demo crew came in and set up construction debris mitigation items like floor protection and dust curtains. They conducted the demo in a very controlled fashion, keeping the demo activities highly contained to the area of work. The crew removed, retained and reinstalled my existing shower fixtures. They also successfully removed and retained my existing shower glass wall and door and hired a shower glass specialist to reinstall that particular system. I appreciated that and the acknowledgment that another contractor had the better knowledge in those types of systems, rather than having IRC tile deal in a matter that's not their specific area of expertise. David's team was also required to make minor plumbing, sub-flooring, drywall and finish flooring repairs on my project. All of the tasks were completed with great care and I made myself available (and was brought in) to review the work at each step of the way before the team added the next layer(s) of the shower assembly. I consider this kind of consideration to be really invaluable and gave a lot of piece of mind, to be able to see each layer of the project being constructed correctly, especially given that this type of work concerns the plumbing system of the house. I even had some challenges with my tile product, which was a production-line issue with the tile company, that David was able to work around, without too long of a project delay from the installation side of the project. At the end of each work-day David would consult with my daily tile craftsman, and then also have a summary conversation with me to answer any questions and address any concerns with the day's activities. Overall it was actually fun to work with David and his team. A situation that could have been completely stressful, because we were working through damages that turned out to be caused by the irresponsible work of someone else, turned out to be a fun problem to solve, with craftsmen who worked with me to resolve routine challenges along the way (like tile patterning, positioning soap niches, the build of the shower curb, repairing sub-flooring from the pan failure etc.). I'd love to work with David and the team at IRC Tile for a non-repair based remodel in the future.