Cci Renovations

Hired CCI for the first phase of a $750,000+ restoration of our West Coast modern home in North Vancouver in 2021. This involved significant structural repairs, envelope upgrades and eventually a complete reno of the interior. We both have experience in the construction industry and are familiar with Part 9 of the building code. Unfortunately, we had to fire CCI after 8 months (~$200,000 work done) and removed them from this project because of slow execution, poor management and poor build quality. We have since then hired a replacement contractor to complete the build over the last two years (along with correcting CCIs work at our cost). We gave CCI a chance to resolve these deficiencies before firing them, but instead were faced with slow resolution and threatened with extra charges. In the end, we decided to part ways and pay at our cost to fix their mistakes after they left the site. It's not worth the stress as there are many better builders out there.

Some things to consider if you plan to hire CCI:

John at CCI structures their contract in such a way to protect themselves - they will require you to pay a deposit that will be applied at the END of the project. This means that you will have no holdback or leverage to deal with unresolved issues. This is in contrast with our new contractor who took a deposit up front and applied it to the BEGINNING of the work, and we pay as work is completed. Our current contractor stands behind his work    and makes sure that things are done correctly. I'm not sure why CCI can't do the same.

CCI does not have their own labor on staff. We had 1 lead carpenter on our job, while the rest of the staff rotated monthly from a third party staffing organization. These 'helpers' were generally expensive and slow. Contrast this to our current contractor who had 4 staff carpenters on site who have been with the company for many years. The quality and speed of the new contractors work was orders of magnitude above anything that CCI did. 

Quality of workmanship was very poor and CCI does not have relationships with quality subtrades. Some examples of CCIs work that caused problems after they left site: windows set out of level, all doors were set out of square, the walls that CCI built from scratch were not true, siding installation (done by sub VA Pro Exteriors) had large gaps, siding not planar (telegraphing from the poor framing underneath), flashing with large gaps. CCI tried to explain that this was normal; however, we have spent nearly 500k to continue this job after firing CCI and I can tell you that it is NOT the norm, and there are reasonable priced builders who can do a much better job. I'm not sure why CCI couldn't get the same level of finish, while our new contractor can.

All jobs like ours are difficult to estimate costs, since there are many unknowns; however, it became clear after only a few months that the cost overruns were mainly due to the slow productivity of their staff and poor oversight by management. They insisted on blaming our structural engineer - although, the scope of work in our drawings was largely unchanged.

I have no doubt that John (owner) will respond to this review saying that we were unreasonable and difficult; however, the difference is that we are difficult because we have called out CCI on their poor workmanship and practices (which others less familiar in the construction industry might overlook). We did not write this review until 3 years later because we wanted to be able to compare the end product which we now have from a high-quality contractor. Our new contractor has done a stellar job, even despite having to work around all the deficiencies that CCI left behind. We hope that this review helps others - ask John to provide our job as a reference. I'm sure I know what his answer will be to you.