Charleston Remodeling

I would give 0 out of 5 stars if I could. We hired Mark to build an addition to our house and it was the biggest mistake we could have made. We have spent 10s of thousands of dollars correcting his mistakes and bringing the house up to code. Mark initially was very responsive but eventually stopped communicating and did not come by the job site for months unless it was to ask for money. He has no organizational skills. There was never a plan for the day and he never had the foresight to arrange for the next sub to come to keep the job going. All but one of his subs were terrible. He always chooses the lowest bidder for the job then pays them less than their bid (if he pays them at all). Most of the subs made your average DIYer look amazing. Although he barely pays his subs you will pay top dollar for shorty work. Almost every fixture in the house leaked and we have had 3 separate (1 very large) gas leak due to improper plumbing work. The list of mistakes is too extensive to list. Almost everything that was done had to be redone because it was done completely wrong. There was zero oversight. Subs would show up and not know what they were supposed to do. Then proceed to do the wrong thing then not come back for days. It took almost a month to tile one shower. I asked for more oversight so we were assigned a project manager who came to the house for about 3 hours every day and smoked in his car. Save yourself a lot of stress and your home a lot of damage and avoid Charleston Remodeling. If you look up his court records you will find multiple lawsuits. Most of the positive reviews were written at the same time with the same style of language. When I read them to Mark he did not deny that he wrote them

Fired for breach of contract. Far too many issues to detail here, but there were so many issues and so many repairs/redo's that this 6 month home addition has taken longer than a year. My wife and two small children are now left with an addition that is not complete that we must fix ourselves. There was very little oversite on the job and virtually no accountability by the subs during this build project. A few examples that we have to include would be that he allowed the electrician to install an electrical subpanel in a closet which is a violation against national building code (then he argued about it and refused to relocate it--until we had the city inspector get involved), most of the fittings in the propane gas line to our new tankless water heater were only "hand tight' which resulted in our propane tank leaking to the point of being empty, they used the wrong type of pipe leading to corrosion within weeks of installing the gas line causing the tank to empty again. We are so lucky that these two issues did not cause a fire or explosion. We asked for tamper resistant outlets throughout and none were installed on the first floor of the new addition. Both Mark and the electrician argued that all the outlets were tamper resistant. I had to remove the outlet covers and send them pictures to prove it.

I should have known we hired the wrong GC when a row of bricks in our addition's foundation were laid in the wrong spot and had to be redone. I should have known that we hired the wrong GC a few weeks later when the original home's roof and the addition's roof were not water tight and NOTHING was done about it as a storm approached. The ceiling in the ONE ROOM Mark told us to put all of our belongs then collapsed due to water ingress. Furniture was damaged, something to the order of 30+ loads of laundry were done, many of my wife's dry-clean only dresses were ruined as were family photos from before the digital age, and Mark only bought us a new ceiling fan and printer/copier machine. I should have known we hired the wrong GC when we learned that at the end of this project that the NEW ceilings in our bedrooms would need to be ripped out in order to install sound dampening insulation as requested because Mark had not done it.

When Mark stopped communicating with us and no longer visited the construction site to check on progress or give oversite to his subs about 5 months into this build, we felt like we had become abandoned and were forced to assume the role of project managers. Subs would show up and not know what they were doing, they installed fixtures in the wrong rooms, tore up things that subs from a different trade had just completed, requiring additional repairs and and many delays. The professional plumber left a couple bath fixtures leaking. Tile was done incorrectly in multiple locations and had to be torn up and redone. Floors were stained the wrong color. A shower was built with no faucets. I promise I cannot make this stuff up and that the list is much, much longer.

When we asked for a schedule to completion, Mark initially agreed but never provided; then he just flat out refused and told us it was best for us to figure out how to complete the project on our own. Can you believe that? I also cannot believe half the "5 star" reviews that all seem to have popped up about the same time we were having so much trouble with Mark and Charleston Remodeling.

I know it's only hearsay, but I cannot repeat here all the negative comments we have heard from other GCs when they were told they would be correcting these issues left by Mark Welborn and Charleston Remodeling.

We hired the wrong GC. Don't make the same mistake