We did a complete home renovation with Strauss Developments starting in Dec 2021, pulled the basement back to the foundation and most of the upstairs of our ~2000 ft2 bungalow. James was brilliant at troubleshooting and problem solving and offered many helpful suggestions as the project progressed. We felt his prices were fair and reasonable. Unfortunately when it comes to customer service, cleaning up the job site and the finishing details the project fell short at the end.
If you are not big on finishing details and don’t mind cleaning up after contractors you might be happy, but when we were handed back the keys to the house on June 1st, 2022 a couple hours before the moving truck was showing up with our household, we had several mostly cosmetic finishing issues outstanding, such as missing paint or poor quality painting, paint over spray on windows, window frames, tiles, skylights, patches of drywall mud that were never painted over (our choice of white paint apparently was problematic), missing coating on the laminate floor (one full room missed, and patches here and there missed which is problematic when some areas are glossy and some are not ), missing silicone in the shower, missing transitions strips, missing cover plates, etc.
As Strauss started actively addressing the deficiencies (albeit unfortunately while we were trying to live in the house and unpack), we started releasing the holdback. However, during this same timeframe additional problems started occurring while we were living in the house, such as a cracked toilet in the basement from being improperly installed causing water damage to drywall, flooring and baseboards, two additional toilets in the main floor improperly installed so the seals leaked causing drywall damage to basement ceiling and door molding in the room my son was sleeping - two different events with two different toilets upstairs. This went on for several weeks after moving in. Once James became too busy with another project to respond to our deficiencies in August and no one showed up for two weeks to our house, we contacted him to find out when we could expect completion of the project and asked if we needed to find someone else to finish the deficiencies. He never responded to the email!!! Crickets. That was the last we heard from him!
Just before the New Year we started having some minor sewage blockage and then back up issues. We have snaked twice, and water jetted the lines multiple times and sent a camera down the line twice. We have lived in the house for over 25 years and NEVER a had sewage issues before. The plumbing companies were telling us that they believed the issues were related to the new plumbing done during the renovation. THEN we noticed water damage in a new ceiling area, and once the boxes were finally unpacked in a staging room it was revealed that there is a a huge sway (1.5 inches or more over a 4 foot span) in our new “laser levelled” concrete floor.
We reached out to James at Strauss and asked him to come and take a look at the issues. Finally this past week we had a major sewage back up that flooded the new basement. Without coming and looking at our concerns, from the comfort of his desk James reported back to us and squarely pointed the responsibility for issues on us, and said regardless he will not honour any warranty work because as far as he was concerned because our account was not in good standing (because of our now small hold back of funds as we waited for him to compete the deficiencies), and we were just lucky he hadn’t taken legal action to begin with for us not paying the remainder of the hold back.
This is the integrity and customer service that we received from Strauss
