D Harvey

The owner / contractor - who makes every single decision for the company - stunned us 3 days before signing a contract by telling us that he was moving to Nova Scotia in just a few weeks. This was after almost two years of working together on the project and already having spent enormous amounts of time and money with Even Construction, the city permit process, lawyers, designers, the cabinet company, and engineers. The contractor knew he was moving well before telling us, and this knowledge would have changed our decision to hire Even Construction had we known. In hindsight, its never too late to change directions no matter how deep you think you are, and we should have. The remote contractor experiment didnt work at all for us. The contractor spent approximately 4 days on site over 8 months of very complex work and did not come to see the start up or the finished work. He did not come when things became extremely challenging and costly for us in spite of being asked to. He tried to manage every detail, every person, and an hourly-paid labour crew from another province through zoom calls and thousands of long, exhaustive, repetitive, unpleasant emails and incomprehensible spreadsheets. This process was difficult, confusing, frustrating, expensive, and time-consuming for us and all workers involved. From what we have learned, complicated construction requires on-site appraisal and supervision by those making decisions in order to do things correctly and cost-effectively. Hard and expensive lessons learned: insist on a quote rather than an estimate, examine the labour pay structure of the contract closely, and pull out when your instincts tell you to. It's never too late. The renovation cost us way more time and money than initially estimated. Since the job was completed, we cannot get warranty work honoured in a reasonable way.