Five stars, for real. (This is the same as my Yelp review.)
There's no end to some people's horror stories about construction jobs. So do three things before you start. (I'll get to Diligent in a moment.)
1. Totally scope out the job; no "requirements creep" change orders. In order for us to do this we had a designer so we could make a plan without making mistakes.
2. Assess your tired old house's weaknesses. I knew we had cloth insulated wiring in places and some foundation cracks. All of that was in the scope of the job, not in "I've got some bad news" difficult conversations. (Why do they never do this on HGTV; must be better TV drama to stick it to the homeowners instead of, oh I don't know, looking first?) I also knew there'd never be a better time to update as much plumbing as I could and run and terminate a 240 volt line to the front of the house for a future plug-in car. So that was in-scope too.
3. Hire Mark. Diligent was a solid partner all the way through the job.
See starmichaeldesign.com/com. Star was our designer (five stars for her too) and, in spite of the URL, ours was the "Beverly Hills Estate," which is a bit of an overstatement for my modest non-estate-like home in the SE corner of the city.
Pretty much everything you see in those photos was done by Diligent. Everything went down to the studs (walls, floor, ceiling) in the kitchen, master bathroom and powder room. Most of the work was done by them and most of the rest by their subs. Demo and removal, plumbing (visible and hidden), electrical, flooring (including leveling), tile (floor, backsplash and all of the bathroom work), fixture and appliance installations, hanging mirrors, framing and installing windows, etc. What you don't see in the photos is the complete redo of the powder room downstairs (almost as big a job as the others), the flooring continuing through the living room/dining room and recessed lighting in the living room.
I know a bit about construction and was watching as we went along. These guys have the skills combined with the integrity to do quality work at a fair price without attempting to squeeze a few extra bucks out of suckers.
The best compliment I can give them is that I gave them more work. They did the second upstairs bathroom as another job because everything went so well.
Two important factors.
1. They are fastidious about clean-up; at the end of the day I felt like I should shoo them out because they were doing too good a cleanup job. My wife and I stayed in the house while the work was being done; something that could have been a challenge with the master bath work right there.
2. They were on schedule to-the-day. Until the cabinet doofuses got in. Manzano (5 stars for the (eventual) quality of the work; 1 star because you may have to quit your daytime job to berate them into doing quality work; they'll do it but only after you keep rejecting their initial sub-standard attempts) took like three weeks to do what should have been a four to five day job. But Diligent wasn't the source of the cabinet sub, so no marks off for Mark.
Communication was good, we were all clear on the plan, Mark got all the permits and inspections done, accounting was straightforward and the payment schedule worked fine for both of us. And I never thought I was getting shunted because of whatever other jobs Diligent had going.
And the results speak for themselves. There really wasn't anything on the punch list because Mark did it right or made it right before I ever saw an issue.
I don't think I'll ever have a job this size again (until after the earthquake). But I keep going back to Mark for additional tasks or recommendations on subs (like roofers). If he has someone he works with, I want to work with them too because I trust Mark.
Diligent gets five stars because they earned them all on a pretty significant job.
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