B.B.G. Carpentry, Inc.

Situation: Mid summer 2011, we demolished the old basement staircase and adjacent sun porch and needed to fill the space by extending the first floor. We knew what was required to build the extension and how to price materials labour and time.

We interviewed several carpenters. Half of them revealed themselves to be competent but over-priced the job.
Some carpenters were incompetent.
A few were highly skilled but busy with a list of clients.
John presented himself and his work with pride and professionalism without being stuffy or formal. He was among the busy carpenters whose schedule was fully booked working on decks and porches during the warm months. Due to his backlog of clients, he would not be free for at least 4 months. However, he proposed that if we were flexible with our renovation schedule, he could work at our house during rainy days since it would be impossible to work on the deck and porch jobs in the rain. We agreed.

As per John’s suggestion, I got the lumber and most of the other building materials delivered to the house to be ready for John to come over on a moment’s notice.

It soon rained hard enough for him to start the project. John does not simply start cutting and installing, he takes the right amount of time to assess the room, how to deal with all the quirks of the existing structure, how to prep for future construction tie-ins, and works out engineering issues in advance. His use of traditional and new technology tools makes him very efficient.

The floor extension took John and his apprentice about 2 days to complete. Our building inspector was happy with John’s work and commented that it tied in perfectly between new and old structure making it one with the house. His only criticism was the half dozen screws driven through the subfloor that did not hit the joists. I cannot directly fault John for this as I know that his apprentice was working on that particular side of the floor. Since it was easy enough to pull the screws and re-set them, I did this myself.

My own main criticism was about cleanup at the end. Cutting is normally done outside but since they worked on rainy days, I allowed all the wood cutting to be done in my (yet to be finished) basement. As a rule, I always return things in the same or better condition and I expect the same. After John and the apprentice finished a great job and everyone was happy, I went down to the basement to look around. I would expect to see scrap lumber at the end of a job but to see it left all over my basement by paid professionals, was unpleasant. The 2 hours I spent sweeping and cleaning up was time I should have been doing something important. Back when I was a lowly apprentice, the menial tasks and cleanup duties were ones I willingly took ownership of. If John hasn’t yet taught these basics to the apprentice, I hope he does soon because he is a good guy and has lots of potential to become a carpenter.

John’s own work is outstanding. He has a strong work ethic. He enjoys his work. He takes pride in his work. He likes people. He has a great knowledge of what is going on in the world (i.e. he doesn’t bury himself in his work).
He is easy to talk to and he can figure out very quickly the technical details, the scope of work, budget and materials.

Without John’s professionalism and his apprentice’s hard work, the job would probably be rated a 7.5 or 8. If John had built in a little more time to oversee quality control of his apprentice’s work and to get the apprentice to clean up, then I would have rated the job a 10.

Overall we are very pleased with the new space. We hope that John is willing to come back to build the next phase of our construction.