Exxell Contracting

I hired Exxell in July 2021 over several other GCs to expand an old detached garage from two bays to four because Mr. Gordon Lee is a very creative thinker and has excellent ideas. I have an old stone cottage in Grey Forest and he worked constantly to tie the details of the garage into the design of the existing home. Beyond that, he stated up front that the price he quoted me would be the price I'd pay, and stood by that promise all the way through. It really is commendable--he is a man of his word.

Some of the issues:

1. Mr. Lee wasn't very good about communicating when workers would be on site, even when I expressly requested that he do so. Too many times to count, I'd wake up to find crews on my property with zero warning. Most times it was simply a nuisance; some times it led to me scrambling to move vehicles or equipment.

2. I had to have some land graded/cleared for a slab. For unknown reasons, his sub piled up the dirt onto a space that partially blocked my driveway, blocking access to the worksite. Mr. Lee and his crew promptly took to driving their vehicles onto my lawn, even after I asked them not to. I had to line my drive with cut-up oak stumps to keep them off the lawn, and even then that didn't always work. When I challenged his sub about the mound of dirt, he said "We didn't tell them to dump it on your drive!" Well neither did I, Einstein. That slag pile is still blocking my driveway. I have to clear saplings from it now.

3. Mr. Lee hired a sub with whom he's worked for years to frame the addition. Unfortunately, this sub had outdated knowledge of the code for allowable spans (or something along these lines; there's a reason I hired a GC). When a more knowledgeable sub was hired to augment the build, the truth came out, and the addition had to be reframed. Mr. Lee ate the cost, but it also ate up his budget. And by that I mean my budget. This meant he doesn't have the money to finish my project, and I've been sitting around with 3/4 of a garage for going on a year, with no place to store my vehicles, no place to secure my tools, and no end in sight.

Since informing me he ran out of my money, he has repeatedly told me he's working other jobs to build up cash so he can finish my job. The last time I heard from him was 19 November, and that was because I had been pestering him since 6 November for an update, something that has become an all-too-frequent occurrence.

He does good work, but doing good work isn't enough if you don't complete the work.