The pros: our new kitchen looks great, in a large part due to the incredible design done by my wife, an excellent architect, and by generally good workmanship from the sub-contractors. The cons: I would never work with F.H. Perry on any future renovation. Here are a few of the highlights:
- Flooring mistake - The sub-contractor who put our flooring in underestimated the amount of material required. This left us with two choices: 1) take a big delay in the project (possibly 3-4 weeks) while we waited for more material to come in, while also rescheduling all subsequent sub-contractors, or 2) tile the visible parts and whatever non-visible parts of the floor we could with the available material. Unfortunately we felt we had no choice but to go with #2 and so now have tile in the visible and some of the non-visible parts of the kitchen, allowing us to neither change out the cabinets or floor without ripping up both.
- HVAC issue - Our site supervisor said it didn’t make sense to heat under the cabinets and recommended putting floor heat underneath only the visible parts of the kitchen floor. Our previous kitchen had heated floors that spanned the visible and non-visible parts of the kitchen, which worked well. But based on F.H. Perry's feedback, this seemed unnecessary. Unfortunately the loss of the additional piping does not allow the floor heat to keep up when the temperature goes below 20 degrees.
- Site supervisor pulled / project overrun - Toward the end of our project, F.H. Perry pulled our site supervisor to work on a bigger project, assigning two people part-time to play this role. We had expected to have a handoff meeting to make sure we had a clean transition, but instead we had two very distracted new people who had very little knowledge of our renovation were rarely here. What was estimated to have been a 10 week project dragged on for another 6-8 weeks with no effective project supervision.
- Cost overrun on drain project - As part of kitchen renovation, we had F.H. Perry take on a drain project in the backyard. We received a verbal only estimate for the work that we thought was high but moved forward. We constantly asked for more details during the project and were told only that “the digging took longer than expected.” When we received the bill it was 5X the estimate, the majority of which was for three diggers / unskilled workers to manually dig a hole. The sub-contractor’s bill was completely indecipherable, and it was clear they were charging for work that could not possibly have been done. In the end, I give F.H. Perry some credit for admitting the absurdity of the invoice and being willing to substantially discount the bill - but only after my wife provided all the details on the workers and hours worked by the contractor.
Overall we had a very poor experience with F.H. Perry and would never consider or recommend them for a residential project.
