Andy Klenke

Review of DESIGNfirst Builders

A mixed review great final product, terrible proce...

A mixed review great final product, terrible process. We were incredibly upfront about our budget and our priorities. We explained that the contract absolutely needed to come in below $40,000 knowing that there would be change orders and unexpected costs along the way that would likely increase that number. After some back and forth, Matt came back with some options it came in at $47,000 but then he broke out a few "extras,", we could get it under $40,000. These extras were not important to us, so we were thrilled! I was out of the country at the time, but Matt told my wife that we needed to sign before a certain date (and put down a deposit) to lock in the price and that when I came back, if there were issues with the design we could revisit that with no penalty which ended up not being true at all. A few problems occurred almost immediately. As we looked at the floor plans they had drawn up, we couldn t quite understand how they fit this extra bathroom into our space.- Turns out, they didn t measure correctly and added two feet of floor space to our upstairs.

So we just asked for our money back. We circled back to our conversations with Matt about the fact that we could get a refund if the plans didn t work out. He says that is not an option. The director of sales, Kevin, calls us and we explain. He defends Matt, tells us we want luxury items and that is not realistic for our price, We explain we want our money back he says that is not an option. So we start over, use the 4th bedroom like originally planned, tell him the priorities that we told Matt, and we go back to the architects. Kevin says, We can definitely do this for under $40,000. So we keep walking down the road, similar things happen, but not to the same extent. Our numbers starts creeping again. We show the architect the e-mail I had from Kevin saying we can do this for under $40,000 and just like that, they take off $7,000 instantly. Why couldn t have we done that before? We finally got to a place with a good plan and we were happy with the scope of work they were going to do, so we started. Our project manger really struggled. I would say 75% of the time she was on site it was to collect a check.

Lastly, we have the change orders. We get that there are unforeseen costs go into construction. The problem is, some of the change orders were for things that were out in the open. On a load bearing wall, the change order came 2 weeks after the work was done (most of the change orders came after the work was already done which was entirely different than the process they laid out at the beginning) and was pretty high. $1,700 to put in a small header. They told me that if I didn t pay for these change orders, that the contractors were not going to get paid. He literally said, You are taking money out of Oliver s pocket if you don t approve this change order I could go on but at the end of the day, we love our master bath/closet. We REALLY enjoyed working with Rod our architect. But overall--rough, rough process.

Update: After my review, I received a call from the owner, Dan. We spoke at length about the project and he was very apologetic. He learned some things about our project that he previously did not know and I was able to expand on our experience to help him better understand some of the challenges. He was grateful for the feedback and assured me that the entire team is doing a debrief of our project to prevent some of these mistakes from happening again. Specifically, he mentioned that the "change order" process will be tightened up to avoid confusion for the home owner. I really enjoyed my conversation with Dan and it meant a lot to me that he reached out. If Design First indeed addresses some of these issues, I would have no problem recommending them or using them for a future project.