We hired Ronal and Vinesh in spring 2015 to renovate our kitchen, ensuite, hall bath and then do some additional tile on two small landings and a basement bath (which also included some new drywall and paint). I waited for nearly a year to post a review because I wanted to do so after some emotion had subsided. We were assured they could work with both our timeframe and our budget and this is the area that was most problematic. There were typical supplier and other issues which I'm not touching on below.
Trades (4 stars)
Generally good but underresourced. One tradesperson to do electrical, plumbing, tile and most installation was definitely a key issue in time management. One negative was any drywall work. Many places where patching, sanding and painting were done had to be re-done, sometimes after they had painted it.
Finishing (3 stars)
The finishing in the kitchen was generally fine, in the upstairs bathrooms less so. At first, A lot of work like grout, caulking, cabinet door installation, was initially substandard, and needed redo. Initial installation of kitchen cabinet doors was crooked, large gaps baseboard grout work and even the wrong colour caulking in the bathroom in places. In many places, as opposed to a nice bevelled bead, there were large finger smears (still are some) from caulking application. I almost forgot that, as they were moving our laundry set back into place after tiling the landing, they broke the doors when jamming them back. We only discovered this late, but ended up removing them.
Project management (2 stars)
When we hired them, we had a budget in mind and a date by which we absolutely needed to be done. While they made the date, literally at the last day, we had originally asked them to be done at least a few days in advance so we could clean before we were off on vacation. Originally they planned to be done a couple weeks early. They seemed really time crunched as the project had been originally a 6 week engagement, which ballooned to nearly 10. They started a week later than planned. Ronal 'thought' they could still do it in 5. I knew that wouldn't happen but also didn't expect nearly 10 weeks. As far as I'm aware, not once did Ronal ever do any kind of timeline planning or use any standard processes such as plugging actuals into estimates and revising.
Budget management (1 star)
In terms of budget management, we started at a $53k estimate with some uncosted things. We expected it to be as high as $60k, and had verbally indicated we could go NO higher than $65k. After multiple requests, we received the 'midpoint' invoice 5 weeks in and it was already at $64k. I pressed Ronal for a reason why and got silence and avoidance. He assured me that most costs were already accounted for. Knowing we would now not even come in at $65k, I told him to be VERY diligent for the remainder of the project. We even removed some work from the basement to keep the budget as low as possible.
The final invoice came in at $74k, a nearly 25% increase over $60k and 15% more than we indicated our limit was. Thankfully, we had enough holdback that we were able to negotiate a small reduction. We had a lot of communication back and forth (mostly from us). We expected a reduction to get us closer to our maximum and we were trying to be flexible, going as high as $69k. Claiming 'unforeseen costs' as the reason, Ronal offered a list of things that were actually in the initial estimate and had either gone up or not had a proper cost assigned to them. The only unforeseen costs in the project were some additional kitchen sub-floor/tile leveling and straightening of frame materials for our ensuite. These additional costs had all been in the midpoint invoice, so the additional $10k from that point to final invoice was, in our minds, just poor budget management. We never received budget updates at any time. In the end, a 3% invoice reduction on a budget blown by about 25%.