Penguin Basements

Overall, I am very pleased with the finished product and have listed the following pros and cons in terms of working with the team.

Pros
- Initial appointment and presentation was very thorough and informative
- Excellent craftsmanship and top of the line materials
- Flexible financing options and the in-house expert was able to offer various recommendations
- In house designer Amy is very professional and able to make recommendation on the overall design when necessary
- Project Manager Jon Reece and office assistant Chris Reece have been very helpful and responsive
throughout the process
- Project cost was very accurate and with very minimal add-ons

Cons
- Overall cost is leaning towards the expensive end but
justifiable based on the high quality materials, not for everyone if you are considering a 20k to 30k basement project
- Buildertrend is an excellent idea to keep track of
scheduling but the actual project is quite off and not updated real time
- Coordination, communication, responsiveness, professionalism and quality controls from the site manager - Walter was a hugh disappointment. There were numerous times I had to play the site manager role and coordinate with the trade guys as a customer to ensure the project stay on track and turn out to the way that was originally intended. Fortunately, project manager Jon was able to step in and take charge of the situation.

Overall, I am extremely pleased with the finished products but points were deducted based on the fact that the customer service aspect was below my expectation given the price point

Penguin Basements did a wonderful job on our basement. The finished product is fantastic and Roberto was a huge help. He answered all of our questions and checked in with us everyday to make sure everything was in order.

The only minor issue we had with Penguin Basements was the communication at the start of the project. We were under the assumption they were going to start the job earlier than they did.

Overall it was a very professional experience and they finished our basement in 18 days which was a welcome surprise being that we have a baby.

After speaking with a number of friends and colleagues whom had either used or were in the process of contracting Penguin Basements, we decided to go with them not only for the look and feel of the final product, but their unique approach to the job.

During our research we received lower quotes, others around the same ballpark however, no one came close to the positive word of mouth experience and final product results that we can now, near the end of our project, attest to.

Penguin staff were extremely courteous, professional, reliable, yet very personable. From our initial sales meeting with Bruce, to the design centre meeting with Amy, the Project Manager Robert, Rocky whom protected our precious hardwood staircase/floors and finally Seth , our Site Manager. Each went above and beyond in their jobs, answered any questions we had, which only added to our overall positive experience, re-assuring us further that we had made the best decision in going with Penguin.

Words cannot express how grateful we are to each of them; especially Seth, whom we got to get to know better throughout the project. His positive, can do attitude, amazing customer service and attention to detail to ensure everything is completed correctly the first time, is truly noteworthy. Although simultaneously managing multiple sites, Seth always managed to stay on top of everything, and treating our job as though it were the only one he is handling.

As for the various crews that worked in our home. We found them all to be very professional, accommodating and not as intrusive as we were expecting!! We can honestly say that the crews on our site were clean, respectful, friendly yet very focused and hardworking.
We did not experience any issues noted in a recent review about the crews treating someone’s home as a job site. This was just simply NOT the case for us. We were VERY impressed!!

The only down side to using Penguin that we feel is noteworthy - the initial sales meeting. Although it took a little longer than we had been told to plan for (4 hours instead of two), looking back it was honestly time well-spent!

We have started moving items into the finished area and looking at our basement over the last few days, we can’t believe how amazing it looks.!! We are looking forward to having the final touches completed over the next few days !

We highly recommend Penguin Basements as they truly are the best and only choice in our view!

Penguin basements did a very professional basement. The team work and the professionalism shown, the attention to detail was excellent. The final product was above our expectations. We now have a beautiful basement, thanks to Penguin.

One minor problem was the placement of our washroom. We already had a spot selected for it. With rough-ins already built in, but the bathroom location could not be accommodated due to building code. Roberto says different.

In all, our experience was very positive and would recommend Penguin basements to anyone.

We are finishing our basement (~1500 sf per floor plan) as we speak, in only about 2.5 weeks, impressive!

At the beginning we hesitated to pick Penguin as we had many referrals from our friends and relatives, and Penguin's quotation was the highest. What made us sign the contract was the knowledgeable staff from Joe at the Green Living Show, to Eric at the show case houses in our area, to Dan who came to our house and gave an informative session of the company, the materials they use and a quotation, we believed the surperb materials and the work of their team would justify the price. And now looking back we knew we made the right choice.

Knowledgeble Staff
- All staff and trade we come across are very skillful and knowledgeable. When other competitors said they could do this and that, Penguin's might said no because they knew the building code. E.g. a contractor said he could change my staircase to another angle which we would like, but Penguin pointed out that the landing and clearance wouldn't make it ok; when another contractor said he would help me minimize the wall thickness i.e. maximize the usable footage, Penguin pointed out that if one presses the insulation to paper-thin to maximize the finished area, it defeats the purpose of insulation; when one suggested to enclose the furnace area to have the wall/door right next to the furnace, again to increase finished area, Penguin told us by building code it needs a few feet for clearance; competitors will say no need for a building permit but as we read the bylaw it clealy says so, etc. just to name a few.

- It's always a pleasure to talk to Chris who helped set up appointments for the project

- The design session with Amy was enjoyable with her best effort to help us visualize the color coordinations between walls, cabinetry, shower, flooring, etc.

Professional and Well Organized Site Managers
- We have Juliano at the start, who gave great advice when we went through the layout design before the actual work began. He was right, often the designer's suggestion might not be practical/workable as she doesn't see the bulk head, ceiling, etc, and we appreciated that he honestly helped us save a few hundred dollars from making a look-out from the stairs, as he thought paying that for only a small triangular look-out was not worth it. The 2-day wall and bulkhead framing was super efficiently done. Angelo was very responsive as well in terms of coordination at the start of the project.

- Seth is the other site manager arranging materials and delivery. He is such a nice and polite guy, he's like always ready to respond and answer your request. All the deliveries were well arranged and even there were times that the delivery guys just left the tiles at our back door, and another guy just left all the vanity and shower doors packages at our front porch and left, he personally brought all things inside the house.

- Roberto is the 3rd site manager come into play to keep the momentum and to finish up the work. He is super! He's a handy man himself, and not only he coordinates all trades and work well, he himself does a lot of things - whatever concerns we might have, once we told him, he addressed them right away and eased away our worries. He sent us short texts about the work schedule and told us we could text him 24/7 if there's any issue. He is so committed to good work and because of him the basement is finishing way faster than we expected.

Skilled and Friendly Trades
We are thankful for all the good trades: Fabio & Renato (framers), Andrill (painter), Hugo & Manuel (Carpentry), Victor (electrician), and the 2 guys that came to cover the floor leading to the basement and also came a couple of times to remove garbage. Excellent job. They work fast but good craftmanship. When the ESA inspector came the end of 2nd week, the first thing he said was "These guys are amazing, aren't they!" Good work ethic and spirit all the time. During the hottest days in September while we still haven't got our a/c, with sweat all over their foreheads, they still smiled all the time. And all of them worked fast so one job after the next very smoothly.

We just had Soraia and Bibiana cleaned up the whole basement this evening. They were so detailed and they cleaned up the inside of cabinets, window screens and even the unfinished area. To our delight they cleaned the furnace surface as well, and most importantly, the washroom we let the workers use over the past 2.5 weeks. After they were done, Roberto came and did a final inspection, and asked them to clean up some white dust on the stairs, that we even didn't notice. Very impressive!

One more thing, we both work full time from home but amazingly none of the work has disturbed us. Workers' in and out have been quiet. We can also tell there's good relationship among different trades which is a good thing to see.

We believe basement finishing is not a glamorous business; in fact, one of the biggest challenges to face is the industry's degraded image incurred by some bad contractors. It takes hard work, dedication, and commitment and extra steps to polish the image of the industry, and yes, we agree and think one should get a building permit to begin a basement project so there'll be no short cut or illegal/substandard building, which eventually will harm the house owner.

Last but not least, we had the pleasure to meet with Guy at the beginning as we had concerns about the cost of the project. Guy took time to listen and helped work out a good solution so we could proceed. A good boss with good crew, we could see how much effort they have put into the business, and that's why we would give a 10/10, even honestly we can't say everything is perfect, but just to show our appreciation to all their hard work and dedication to raise the bar of the industry and their best attempt to satisfy the customers. Way to go Guy and the crew, wish you all the best! With a beautiful basement and peace of mind from the quality work, we look forward to showing off our basement and recommending to our neighbors (and we hope the post-project/warranty support is as good)!

~ Howard & Jen
PS. We don't have communication problems like other reviewers did, but agree that with the useful Buildertrend app, it'll be nice to have updated work schedule/calendar reflected there.

Updated October 31st

We have lowered our review to 6 due to the absolutely pathetic warranty support offered by Penguin. Just like most companies, once they have your money, you no longer matter to them.

We have to chase them over and over just to get simple things fixed. Even when we do get them to do the work, they do it so fast and screw things up further.

Original Review

We just completed our renovation and are very happy with the end results. That said, the 9 out of 10 rating only applies to the quality of the end product and the services tied to it. Since we cannot break down the ratings any further here, I wanted to provide a secondary rating for the planning/communication aspect of the project: 6 out of 10.

Initial in house consultation

Quite frankly, this meeting was just too long. We had to sit through 3 hours of why our materials are great, why we are great, history of laws, history of materials. There was lots of “this is how we do it, too bad for you if you want it done a different way”. This actually was a really big turn off for us. We were really on the fence and almost did not sign on. People are not stupid, we do our research and we understand what Penguin is about.

The initial designs that were presented to us were pretty bad to be quite honest. We really had to push to get it closer to what we had in mind. We had to fight through a lot of “this is how we do it” as mentioned before.

Looking back on the project, our sales rep missed all kinds of obvious things that ended up affecting the budget. He also made us promises that were not communicated to the rest of the team.

In house measurements

This is where the project manager comes in and does measurements for the drawings and city permits. We had Robert come through with a few other people and the process went well.

Design meeting

If you have ever purchased a new home, you will be very familiar with this process. It’s just on a smaller scale since it’s only for the basement. Our project was relatively simple and I found that travelling all the way to their office to pick of few things was a waste of time. Many of these selections could have been made online. I understand that more complicated basements would require in person discussions but for simple ones, this could free them up for other things.

Decisions on certain aspects of the project such as where the washroom would be, how big it would be, where the appliances would be were made based on the measurements taken while the team was in our house. We were happy with those and they made sense.

Radio Silence

As time moved on, we heard nothing from Penguin in regards to a start date. We wanted to get an idea so that we could plan things on our end like moving everything out the basement. I repeatedly reached out to various members of the team and heard nothing. Not even an acknowledgment of receipt of my messages. After repeated attempts to contact them, they finally responded with the excuse of “we are growing, it’s crazy busy, people have been transferred to different roles”. That is understandable but there is no excuse to let people hang like they did. Is it so hard to say “We received your email and will get back to you soon”.

They were finally able to slot us in since another job was put on hold. Once that happened, the ball got rolling really fast.

In house wall placement

Our project manager changed due to the restructuring mentioned above and we had the pleasure of dealing with Juliano. Great guy but not really part of the nitty gritty of the project, basically wasn’t present after this meeting. He was good at answering our questions via email afterwards though.

This was a good meeting. The guys doing the framing were there with us to provide insight on placement, etc. What completely baffled me however was the fact that choices made during the design meeting with the laser measurements taken had to be completely thrown out the door. For example: the placement of our washer, dryer and sink did not even come close to working when done in person. Not sure why this was the case, our basement did not shrink…

Juliano and the team were great at making adjustments on the fly. I am glad that we made the choices we did during this meeting, everything turned out great!

Construction

In general, this process went well. There were however some hiccups and issues along the way.

Two rather large issues:

First of all, there are some big communication issues going on internally. This is a common theme throughout most reviews.

Promises made by sales people are not communicated forward even though they were supposed to be.
Decisions made during design are not communicated forward even though they were supposed to be.
Reminders of these decisions were given to every manager that came through our house and yet when the trades arrived to do their work, they knew nothing of these items. At the end of the day, Penguin did live up to all of the decisions without much fuss which was great!

We found that in general, it wasn’t very clear who was in charge each step of the way. We dealt a lot with Seth, he was really good at helping with the flow. I think some improvement can be made here, it should not be too hard to keep people informed.

Penguin makes use of an app to, in theory, keep people informed but the schedule isn’t even close to being accurate and it is not updated. Nature of the beast I suppose, in the end everything was figured out.

If I could go back and do it again, I would have made sure to get every single promise in writing just to avoid issues.

Secondly, many of the trades treated our house like a job site. The basement is the job site, the rest of my house is our house and you should have some respect and follow what we instruct.

You will have an option to get a porta potty outside your house… I advise you take it. Our bathroom was disgusting, so much so that I had to cover all of the walls in plastic. It was like animals were in there.

The biggest concern that we had was the fact that many of the trades would leave the front door wide open. Having flies and bees in your house is not fun but the big issue here is security. Anybody could just walk in. Thankfully we were home most of the time but there were some occasions that we were not and came home to a wide open door with people working away in the noise, clueless as to who is coming and going. The dry wall guys even left our basement window open with no screen on it.

We mentioned to many of the trades that we wanted the door to remain closed. It was like we were asking them to cut off their hand or something. Our house, our rules. It got so bad with them ignoring us that we had to escalate up to management. After that, things got better but we still had to remind some of the trades.

In contrast, some of the trades were the most amazing and considerate people. Top marks to the tapers and the painters. A+ guys!

Finishing

This was the best part of the job because it is when a gentleman named Roberto takes over. I can’t thank him enough for his incredibly hard work at coordinating all of the last bits of the project such as painting, trim, electrical/plumbing, cleaning, etc. He even went above and beyond to help us with various other things. Absolute pleasure to work with, I can’t state this enough. A+++++.

Penguin has a cleaning crew come through at the end and they did an amazing job. Basement is spotless, they cleaned up all of the areas that the workers came through. And yes, they even returned our bathroom to it’s former state.

At the end, we stood in our basement and were completely over joyed with it. Yes there were bumps along the way but the team really did their best to make it all work.

It was a great experience, the people are great. Project was completed ahead of schedule and Juliano and Roberto were excellent people to deal with. They hold a great respect for customer service.

Great work, excellent quality contruction supplies. Walter was awesome as Construction Manager. He handle properly all crew members, planning tasks and kept me inform of all the Project stages and progress. 20 stars to him. Regarding office staff Maria as Project Administrative Assistant was great providing info when required. One thing I suggest Penguin to upgrade is their Office Phone Receptionist, some times I had to call back in order to get in touch with office staff. Bottom line, if you want somebody to turn your basement into an awesome basement then you need to call Penguin and ask for Walter as your Construction Manager. Thanks Walter for care and for your commitment on my basement project !

We are happy overall with the turnout of our basement, it looks amazing and is what we wanted. Seth was the Project Manager we dealt with, he was pleasant and informative, he let us know who was doing what renovations and what day. The only issue we had was that the reno took a little longer than planned.
My recommendations to Management is to ensure your team keep your clients informed if and when there are delays in any aspect of the construction.

So, I saw lots of reviews and I have experienced both sides of it during my basement renovation. I am putting few points from my point of view here.

Design
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As metioned by many in the reviews and accepted by company itself, communication is one part Penguin has to work tremenduously. My design rep who signed the contract with me over-promissed so many things, provided half baked information and did so much poor job in coming up with first design. They were my first contact for basement rennovation and I went with them cosidering their big name that I will get experts to design who will best in their line of work. I was so happy on the day when I signed the contract. My biggest mistake was not to go line by line on the contract as I was told by rep that contract contains everything we discussed. Later on when I started visiting various basements, I realized that my design was so poor and rep wasted so much space so that actual usable and finished area was so small. When I contacted the him, he made adjustement based on my comments and that is when I started getting change orders with additional costs.

Design Interview
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During the desing interview, I came to know about so many surprises by the lady that my original design rep forgot to mention. I had to cancel my whole bar due to miscommunication by the rep. I had to travel 2 hours to their office multiple times to talk to their owner on multiple such over-promised items. I had opted for ethernet cables, 7.1 surrond system and somehow rep formgot to mention that in the original contract and when I reminded him, again I was sent big change order. This rep has so much communication problem that after sending multiple emails, texts, calls, I will get response after days which is also out of context.

I was very satisfied to talk to the owner who was very sensible person and somehow we were come to some conclusion.

Financing
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I dealt with Sergie on my finance and my interaction with him was the best among all the interactions so far. He was so responsive, helpful and patient to deal with all the issues on the road and helped me a lot to keep moving and getting financing done. I have to mention that my design rep overpromised again on the finance and I didn't get all the terms as promised but Sergie did his best to get us to where we are. If this guys would not have put so much efforts, I would have cancelled my contract long back.

Implemenation
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I worked with Walter when actual work started as site manager. I have to give credit to him as he really inherited a mess created by his friends. As I understood, Walter has to work within the boundaries of the documentation passed to him as he was not originally involved in promising to me, he did wonderful jobs in keeping everything afloat. He might not be the best communicator but he was able to work between various problems and help me out to finish my work. He was responsive enough to keep me upto date on what is going on the background and keep me upto date on who is going work next day and so on.

We started work on 5th July. All of my work got completed around 25th August. Due to some problem, I still have to get my stairs but I understand that there are circumstances even they cannot control. As far as they are finishing it in the promised timeframe, I am happy.

Overall, I am happy with how the end product is turned out. I hope, I get good warraty support (I was promised 2 years after completion date and I hope there is no surprise there...:)). I have seen many basements and I can cleary see difference in the work.

I will definitely recommand them to my friends due to quality I got at the end of the job but I will have to make sure that I am there with them when initial contract is being built and design is being finalized as I don't trust anyone coming for first design interview...:)

Thank You,
Hiren