Artiste Renovations & Contracting

My wife and I hired Barry at Artiste Renovations to do a big renovation job before we moved into our new house. It involved several subcontractors: electrician, carpets, plumbing, drywall, and painting.

Overall, Barry did a wonderful job of organizing everything, and keeping it all as low-stress for us as I think is possible. Surprisingly, it was all done in a much shorter amount of time than expected! I think it was all completed 10 days before he had estimated it would be.

The carpet installer did wonderful job of the installation - the carpet looks great, and seems secure - but left things quite untidy. There were lots and lots of little strands of fibre, presumably from the cutting of the carpet, just absolutely everywhere. Our vacuum didn't do a good job of picking them up, so we're just dealing with having carpet fluffs everywhere for now. Also there were a few bits and pieces left behind, like a small triangle of carpet left on a shelf, things like that.

The lighting fixtures were one of most stressful parts. We selected the new fixtures ourselves, and afterward found out a couple of them couldn't go in the locations we'd chosen them for, for example because the base of one wasn't wide enough to cover the hole in the ceiling that it was going into, so we had to select alternate locations for a few at the last minute. We were recommended a very specific type of lightbulbs which we couldn't find locally, so ordered on Amazon. The electrician said one of our light fixtures isn't dimmable even though the web site we ordered it on and the box it came in both said it is, so that's something we're going to figure out later on. But other than that, in the end the light fixtures turned out looking great and working well.

I'm very impressed with the drywall and painting in particular. There were tasks that you can't tell were done because the walls look so smooth and nice, like that's how they originally were. (Removing some sconces from a wall, removing built-in shelves from a wall, and changing the corners of a doorway from rounded to right angles.) It all looks lovely!

I'm sure we were quite annoying to work with, because we kept adding more tasks to the job as we thought of more things we wanted done, but Barry took it all in stride. He let us know what was and wasn't possible, and didn't give us a hard time about it. The only downside is that because of the way we added tasks, we didn't find out the total cost until it was all done, but that wasn't unexpected. We had been given an accurate quote for the initial list of tasks, and then the final cost had all the additional stuff added on.

At the beginning of the job, Barry took a key, which he kept in a lockbox outside the house for the subcontractors. That was very convenient for us, as we didn't have to go to the house to let people in.

In conclusion: any complaints I might have are either unavoidable aspects of doing such a big job, or are pretty minor. A lot of great work was done in a very quick amount of time, for what I believe is a reasonable amount of money. Barry was very organized and accommodating, and managed all the other workers in a way that limited our stress. I'm very happy with the work that was done, and would recommend Artiste Renovations to others.