Thorough research should be done before hiring Penguin. Be aware that they are taking on so much business that they cant keep up with, so we had trades in our home who had never worked with Penguin before. In addition to inexperienced trades, no one from management ever came to our home to review the work done by the trades. Trades would show up unannounced and do work without any information given to the homeowners. Penguin employees and management were rude to us anytime we questioned the work done in our home. After the final work was done, we realized how many mistakes were covered up by more mistakes. Our wheelchair accessible bathroom was the most important part of this job, and it is absolutely awful. When Ive followed up about things done not according to drawings, or very poor quality work, Im left with silence. Do not hire this company.
- Approximate cost of services:
- $115,000.00
- Company Response
This kind of review is never fun to read, but we do read them, look into them and see what we can do to improve from them. That being said, we believe the reason this review was written with so much bite is it turns out that the client reached out during our Christmas period shutdown, and we simply missed their message, and never got back to them. That should not have been the case, and for that we’re very sorry.
Now moving into the time of this review being posted, the client felt that their only way of “getting our attention” was this review. We probably deserved that, and again sorry. We will do better.
Now that we are aware of the concerns, we are quite relieved to see it’s an easy fix. Essentially this basement was built for a senior family member that required accessibility features for every room. There’s an elevator, custom bar, accessible shower, and a platform for the toilet to bring it up to a perfect height of 20”.
So where did we falter? We built the platform at the 20” height, or so we thought, but we didn’t consider the mortar, tile and tile edge installed by our tiler, which lifted the total height of the seat by about 1”. This consideration is so exact that it wasn’t even identified during our substantial completion walk-through nor communicated understandably until weeks of use made the error obvious.
We’ve spoken to the client and the parent that’s using the space. We confirmed their preferred height is exactly 20” and we’ve scheduled an appointment to take care of it.
A few more points with reference to the comments made; this highly complex and detailed project took about 2 months to complete, including a permit revision (considered reasonably fast when dealing with some municipalities). There was an assumption made that we have “A” and “B” trades, but that simply isn’t the case. We did engage a new Plumbing Service Tradesperson on this particular project who was highly recommended, and we spoke with them via a series of phone calls over the course of this build, and their work had no impact on our error as noted by the client.
We are thankful that the client brought this matter to our attention, because this important detail could and should be rectified for the safety and comfort of the user. We have a good line of communication now, and we expect that the review will reflect that when we’re done. Pobody’s Nerfect, as they say, we’ve owned this error and fully intend to rectify it to everyone’s satisfaction. We strive to do the best we can do with each and every build!
We hope your parent will be able to fully enjoy this unit you had built for them.