Storey Construction - Austin, Texas

Brynn Rinehart

It is hard to know where to begin with recounting our nightmare experiences with Storey Construction. They will tell you they charge a 20% "management fee" on top of the project they contract with clients. In our experience they were almost never available and poorly managed the projects we had contracted them to finish. John Storey told us multiple times "we'll fix this" meaning all the damage their employees caused would be fixed at no additional cost to us. However, they billed their employees work hourly and the employees don't "log out" when they are "fixing" theirs or someone else's mistakes. So you end up paying and worst of all most times the mistakes were not fixed properly. We learned early on to stop pointing all the damage their employees/sub-contractors caused lest we have to deal with more damage. Several times John spoke poorly about his employees to me in front of them; it is extremely uncomfortable. Most of Storey's employees were nice enough just not skilled to get the job done right. And since their was little to no oversight dragging out the completion of the project John expected us to give his guys mulligan after mulligan after mulligan. He loudly exclaimed I was "extremely difficult" because I questioned the order in which projects he had told his guys to get done. When he drove back to express his displeasure with me he realized he was wrong but never apologized for telling me I was "extremely difficult." He also almost accepted two exterior doors [I am regretting so deeply contracting Storey Construction to order and install] that had the wrong in-swing. I caught the mistake, they were sent back to the manufacturer were it took a couple days to be corrected. Then John in the following weeks proceeded to state we were too "inflexible" with our schedule even though it was not our mistake and the thing that was causing him grief was not having the doors to install when he had scheduled with us to install them. He told me on the day of the delivery that he was short-staffed; that he couldn't find anyone to "take on" extra hours. We made ourselves and our home available at his request for 5 days including a Saturday. It makes me want to cry the money spent and how we've been treated. I have to believe there are better contractors out there. Storey Construction's hostility began when we pointed out their first mistakes, then it just snowballs. Ty & John Storey know exactly how to get a project done right; that's how they convinced us they were the right contractors for us. However, we soon realized that they didn't actually do what they said they would do after we hired them. As a side note our bathrooms were quite disgusting after a day's work. One sub-contractor showed up punched in for work and then proceeded to work on his car. I sent him home; John said "he had no idea [that was going to happen."] Exactly. We paid a premium for "project management" and for the most part Ty and John were clueless as to what was actually happening. There is no point in paying more for project management if you are going to have to be the one managing the project.

chris