We started a remodeling project with Shirey in May. At the intial meeting, we say down with Donna Shirey and were completely sold on the company. We were clear with every person we talked to about our budget-300k. We were assigned an architect and he came to the house and did drawings of everything we said we wanted. Again, we repeated our budget. The architect came back to us with drawings and we moved into the estimating phase. The estimate came back at and we made adjustments based on our budget and got the project down to 255k. There were several parts of the project that we couldn't do but we were happy with what would be done. After a couple of months of demolition and construction-mostly framing-the bills are pouring in. It is quickly becoming evident that if something didn't change, we were going to be hugely over budget. As I became increasingly frantic, the bills continued to come in. I demanded a meeting with Riley Shirey and our estimator Pauline Neault. As my husband and I stood in our kitchen with no windows, no entry doors and plastic covering our new section of house, we were told that Shirey had estimated the job wrong mostly from the framing perspective. They estimated that the job would end up being closer to 300k but they would go back and look at everything and get back to us with clearer numbers. They suggested at that point that they stop work!!! And wait until we had the money to continue or decide what we wanted to do. We lived in the house during the remodel and with 3 kids and 4 dogs, waiting was not an option. Again, we walked around cutting projects from the list to stay closer to our numbers. Shirey was all over the board with numbers... They went to 330k and at one point were up to 360k. They blamed their inability to give us true numbers on the screw up on Pauline's estimating and also the foreman's talking us into options and not giving us the numbers to go along with those options. We were stuck with no good options. The office staff is disorganized and sloppy-we found many errors on our invoices and every points fingers at everyone else. It was a enormously costly nightmare for us. I did write a letter to Donna Shirey regarding my displeasure and never heard back from her. We did get a fruit basket at Thanksgiving though. That fruit cost me 350k.
The construction staff was a pleasure to work with-honest, hardworking and communicative. The in house staff needs to be revamped starting with hiring people with construction background and experience to get the job costing right.
I would not recommend Shirey nor would I use them again.
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