Not recommended for renovations project

We had quite a large renovations project for a new property and used Ackerbou because of a BNI reference. The quote received came at a premium, but we were willing to pay this to get a stress- and hassle-free building project. This was not what we got.

The following is a list of the main issues we had: 1) Contract: His building contract was very one sided, and we luckily picked up on a few things to amend before signing it. This includes us paying for his legal fees. 2) Mitigation: A clause in the contract includes a Quantity Surveyor that must be used for mitigation. The cost related to this wasn’t discussed with us after numerous requests which worked out very expensive and there is an existing relationship between the two of them which didn’t count in our favor. 3) Quote: A quote was given without a full inspection of all requirements and anything that he didn’t plan for became our cost. 4) Building standards: He added one lintel for a double garage door where we planned to build a double story on top of. The Engineer stopped this, but the additional support then became our problem and cost. 5) Engineer: Taking shortcuts and not following instructions from Engineer. A few concerns, but the main item was the additional support that was required for the double story on top of the garage and work had to be redone a few times until the engineer agreed with the outcome. 6) Inspection: Not inspecting workmanship sufficiently of team and issues we picked up had to be fixed at our own cost. This includes a skew lintel that he charged us to fix / Breaking most of the ceiling which we had to fix to and extend / damage to the main power line to the property which we had to fix at our time and cost. 7) Plumbing: We struggled to get the plumbing certificate from him and arranged with another company to provide it. They then sent a plumbing inspector who review the plumbing and found fault with most of the plumbing work. After weeks of negotiation this was fixed after we moved in. 8) Floors: Floors for a big portion of the property was screeded. After the floors were installed, we noticed unevenness. We had to move the furniture out and redo all the floors. 9) Timeline: They took more leave over December than official builders break and didn’t finish the roof. The extra leave taken resulted in significant project delays because of bad weather which wouldn’t have been an issue if the work was completed before the break. We had to incur additional rental cost for the period.

This concludes a high-level summary of the main issues we had, but there was a lot more issues which resulted in constant conflict and an absolute terrible process emotionally and financially.