Cory E.
1/5
In a world of Net Promoter Scores from 1-10, I would give Davies a 1 (a detractor score). I've held this review for 5 years for worries about how Davies might respond. We moved out of our home for 11 months for a remodel project we were told by Davies would take 4-6 months. And while the craftsmanship is good (see the photos below) there are many serious concerns I would flag here in opposition to many of the reviews posted here by employees and friends of the company. I should also note that we and they were prepared with attorneys at the end of the project and we ultimately settled in order to forego legal headaches.
1) Subcontractors: For the first 3 months of the project our project supervisor could not get their own subs to come and even bid on the project. He ultimately had some of his friends (not affiliated with Davies) come and do the work (excavation, framing, electrical, plumbing). The supervisor ended up leaving Davies after 4 months on our project. He shared horror stories on the way out. Our house then sat for 6 weeks with almost nothing done on it.
2) Project Management: After we started, we began hearing from internal employees and subs about the challenges of working with Davies. It scared us. The common inference was that the company was in it for awards with the Parade and if you weren't a parade home, and especially if you were doing a remodel, watch out. We spent more time coordinating and scheduling subs to work on our home than anyone else. Commonly we heard of the challenge of getting subs to respond to our project team. Many of their subs never did respond and we had to get our own: finish electricians, finish plumbers, stone work, all hardware, plumbing fixtures, etc. All of that I arranged on my own. Oddly, we had an opportunity to have a Christmas special about home remodels at Christmas-time filmed in our house with Magnolia Network (Chip & Joanna Gaines), but this didn't motivate them to finish.
3) Disorganized operations: Our project bills/draws were most often not done within the scope of time laid out in the contract. And when we received the bills, we've had to make significant changes to correct them. We were told several times that people in accounting had left the company and that it was causing lots of disorganization and delay.
4) Bids v. Actuals: Our contract was a typical contract. We contracted with Davies for cost-plus work, they then create sub-contracts with trades. Our contract specifies that they will get bids from trades and have us review and approve those. Sadly, this rarely occurred. We didn't see most bids, only the estimate put on our project cost document which we were told reflected the bids. However, even then, the invoices we received from trades often exceeded the bids by 50% or more. By contract, that should require some sort of change order if there was any change of scope, but we never received a single change order to sign. Davies simply passed along all costs in spite of the clear over-charges that we didn’t agree to. Toward the end of our project we submitted a formal letter of complaint to Steve Davies asking to please see all bids on the project, all invoices on the project, all change-orders on the project and a copy of the the sub-contracts with the trades. We didn't hear back. Silence. Within the first few weeks of the project our 3rd party designer and architects shared our exact project and material specifications with them. It was incredibly detailed. Dozens of pages of spreadsheets. Down to the color and material specification for every finish in the house. Davies refused to price out the material costs. They said it was the responsibility of the designer. The designer wouldn't either claiming that it was always the contractors job to give these project quotes. After 6 weeks of arguing and no one doing it, I finally spend dozens of hours getting the material costs myself.
At the end of the day, our home is beautiful and the craftsmanship has been great quality...see the pics. I just would warn against using Davies.
