When we embarked into this home renovation journey, we asked 4 general contractors to give us an estimate. They all came to the house to visit and we immediately had a very good feeling for Naty, the owner of P&P. He gave us more ideas than the other guys, he shared his passion for a job well done and the customers. We only got 2 quotes back, I guess the other guys were too busy, and after a back and forth to clarify the key points, P&P was the best value considering the amount of work required (basement, laundry room, stairs, complete kitchen, 2 bathrooms, adding windows and patio doors, new hardwood and ceramic floor for 2/3 of the house, etc, etc). I checked 2 of the references provided and they were all good.
Our experience during the project was really good.. Natigo, the son of Naty knows his job very well and worked really hard on our project. For 8 weeks, there were on average 2 to 3 guys working. They were on site early aroud 730/8am and it was not unusual to see them wrapping up only around 8 pm or more..
There were a lot of decisions to make and material to buy but Natigo made it easy for us by providing good advises and recommending what we should be doing.
We did our kitchen with Lowes - P&P did the preparation very well and Lowes installed the kitchen. Elite was the installer. The cabinets are great but we were not impressed by the guys from Elite and the design was not the best. The quality of the work performed was average at best and the communication very poor. Not sure I would with Lowes again..
For a big project like a home renovation project, I would recommend to go with the contingency fee that Naty is proposing. There were a lot of changes on this project, the bigger ones were paid on top of the original costs but P&P did no ask for incremental money for a lot of the smaller but still significant changes.
If I was to find room for improvement, I would say that some of the tile quantities were a little overestimated and we ended up with a bit more left over than I would have liked (the company we dealt with did not take returns after 30 days - you may want to check that). Also, in some areas, the quality of the finishing - painting and staining could have been a little better.
Overall, I would definetly recommend P&P. They are truly concerned about the customer and they worked really hard. At the end of the project, Natigo spent 3 or 4 Saturdays of his own time with me to finish some wiring work and I do not think a lot of contractors would do the same. Also they wanted so bad our stairs to look good that they offered to pay some of the costs of the iron posts.. At the end of the project we had lunch with them everyday and it was good fun..
I just finished the last piece of the project hooking up the home theater equipment in the basement with the projector and it is great. We love our house!! .. Thanks Naty, Natigo and crew..