Zoltan Farkas Construction

Over the past 20 years, we have hired Zoltan Farkas Construction (ZFC) to do 4 major remodeling projects on our Seattle house in the Montlake neighborhood. We were satisfied with each project, and we have recommended Zoltan to do projects for friends of ours.

Our house was originally built before WWI as a gardener’s cottage. Over the course of these 4 projects, ZFC has remodeled the kitchen, shored up the foundation, rebuilt two upstairs bedrooms, and added a bonus room upstairs. The house looks great now, and we are delighted with the result.

Because of structural issues that emerged with the passage of time and the poor quality of the original construction, we occasionally experienced unexpected costs and delays during the renovation process. Each time this happened, Zoltan explained the causes and issues clearly, and laid out the options for us to consider. Zoltan was unerringly congenial, professional and empathetic. His bills were detailed and correct. My wife was usually home and could tell that the hours logged were always correct.

Having Zoltan manage the subcontractors for us saved us time and hassle. Zoltan reminded us that we could save ourselves his added markup if we worked directly with certain subcontractors, especially on adjacent projects. We did this once or twice, but we usually had Zoltan take care of it. When issues came up with subcontractors, Zoltan handled them, and they weren’t problems for us.

We are experienced old house owners (we also had an old house in Ohio which we had renovated), so we understood that some surprises are to be expected. I think this perspective helped our relationship with Zoltan. We lived in the house through each of the projects, so we were always available to discuss the choices that needed to be made. By the end of the construction, Zoltan and his crew felt like members of the family. They were great to be with – all of them were polite, they were great with the kids, and they always cleaned up after the day’s work.

In 2017 my husband and I hired Zoltan and his subs for a house remodel. It was a very extensive project with walls being removed, structural integrity questions, and updating our plumbing and electricity. We interviewed about 6 different potential companies and General Contractors that included referrals from friends, and coworkers. We asked everyone we interviewed to physically come to our house and let us know the budget and timeline for this kind of project and if they had questions/concerns given that our house is over 70 yrs old. Zoltan was the best person we interviewed by far. He not only asked to see our basement and crawl space but walked through pointing out areas of concern and insisted we also hire an architect/structural engineer to review the plans since the project was so complicated. He said that he could make recommendations but would work with whomever we chose. No one else was this detail oriented or willing to tell us the extent of the project and all it'd require and give us a reasonable idea of budget. Before the project started Zoltan gave us a detailed summary of the budget to expect along with the contract to sign and we actually managed to come under budget by the end. Throughout the process Zoltan continuously offered ideas on how we could save money and options whenever it was possible. There were a few unexpected dilemmas due to the age of the house and Zoltan handled these without any issues at all. If ever there was something we wanted done that he couldn’t provide then he’d let us know immediately – we never felt that he would oversell his abilities or that of his subs. It’s been a full year since our project and I'm overdue for writing this review but I'm happy to be contacted and speak with anyone who has questions about using Zoltan and his crew. To this day, we've not needed a single update/change/fix for anything done for the remodel and we talk about how much more we love our house and the remodel to everyone we know. I haven’t a single hesitation in highly recommending Zoltan.

We had a terrible experience working with Zoltan Farkas Construction and could not recommend them. We hired Zoltan for a major remodel in 2015 and ended up firing him 7 months into the project. Our project ended up being very difficult (unexpected foundation problems dramatically changed the scope of the work) and he was not up to the challenge. The main issues were with his project management, budget management, communication, and bookkeeping. He did not get competitive rates from his subcontractors and allowed them to rack up charges far in excess of their initial quotes without telling us (for example, his electrician gave what appeared to be a fixed bid of $15,000, then racked up hourly charges of nearly $30,000, which Zoltan did nothing to stop or to communicate to us while it was happening). (After firing him, we had an independent assessment done of the value of his work vs. what he had charged us, and it determined that we had been overcharged by about 40%.) When we did an audit of Zoltan's invoices against receipts just before firing him (which in retrospect we should have been doing from the beginning), we found tens of thousands of dollars in overcharges (despite him having a paid bookkeeper) and questionable practices (for example, charging us double markup on one of his crewmember's hours). He changed to a new invoicing system partway through our project and led us to believe that he was within budget when in reality he was wildly over budget (he later acknowledged that his system was misleading, though claimed it was unintentional, and said he would have to make serious changes to his methodology in order to stay in business). He made major decisions without consulting us (like converting our 5-year-old water heater to an expensive tankless system), despite us having numerous conversations with him about the importance of communication, and us never authorizing him to make decisions on our behalf. He had no explanation for most of these things, but hired an attorney to try to pressure us into paying him in full, which we did not do. Ironically, he told us that we had been one of his best clients. We are fortunate that he didn't bankrupt us and would caution anyone considering working with him to question him very closely about what he has changed in response to the many deeply troubling issues we experienced with him.