We met with Owen to finish a whole home reno with an addition at the back for approx. $630k under a proposal they submitted. Adam was our project manager. Weenen has some friendly site staff and promotes its ability to use its own staff to keep projects moving when there are delays from sub-contractors.
We indicated we needed a standard contract, and the CCDC 5B was recommended to us as a common contract in the construction industry. However, after everyone signed, Weenen refused to share the project budget or the actual project expenses as provided for under the contract. (The proposal didn’t list all budget items). After some pressure, they provided a budget and then some receipts a few weeks later.
When we looked at the receipts, the actual cost of many items was thousands less than what they were intending to charge us on their budget (basement slab, excavation, framing, plumbing, stairs, roofing, etc.). There seemed to be a pattern of inflating the value on budget items above their actual value, so we ended up removing ~$100k in items such as kitchen, insulation, and HVAC since we found much lower bids than Weenen provided, bringing our budget down to approx. $517k. Weenen still maintained their management fee at $150k, which was 30% of the budget by that time, and never provided an explanation for why it was so high.
Despite this high fee, Weenen provided very little administrative support on the project. They refused to send in any of our rebate paperwork, did not produce any notes from our meetings, and did not provide budget updates. We asked them for work schedules – which they eventually produced – but didn’t finish many items as scheduled. While Owen and Adam were nice at first, this quickly changed. Adam became surly and rude to us and other site staff and Owen became aggressive on phone calls. Our architect even had to hang up on one call. We increasingly relied on email communication and asked Joe (president) to accompany Owen on a couple of key meetings.
After months of fighting for financial info and running over schedule, we asked them for a plan to improve. They responded by blaming us for every issue we listed and added that they were not bound by the contract they signed. We terminated and proceeded to finish the house ourselves.
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