Acoutera Renovations

Response from Acoutera Renovations

Dear Jordana, you hired us in March 2021 for a partial bathroom renovation. The starting date for the project was June due to the lead time for some of the products requested. David was assigned as your project manager and was introduced to you prior to the project started. Each of his tradespeople are certified and have the required licenses to perform their work. We have a fairly extensive process for onboarding new contractors, and we collect these documents at the earliest stage of the vetting process when they are hired.

The project began and proceeded very smoothly. However, throughout the course of the work, you had asked for a few additional things to be completed. After sending a change order and with a breakdown of the additional charges resulting from the changes you requested, you refused to sign or pay for the change order. Because of this, the tradespeople did not want to return to the job-site knowing that it was likely that you would never pay your final balance.

It is also our company s policy to halt work if a change order or invoice isn t paid within 3 days - we have been hurt in the past by doing work before it s signed or paid for. This change order was never signed or paid for, and a good portion of the work had already been completed for free.

With 3 days worth of labor left to complete the renovation, you left for Calgary to work there the entire month of July, without making any arrangements for David to enter your unit to complete the work. You specifically advised your project manager that you would make arrangements to have it completed when you got back to Vancouver.

Upon your return, with no resolution on the previous change order, you were not happy to discover that the bathroom wasn t complete. Unfortunately, finishing the renovation was not possible for David, as he could not enter the space while you were away for a month.

You requested a full breakdown of the outstanding invoice, which was provided to you over email on (insert date). Instead of agreeing to pay the invoice or sign the change order of your requested alterations, you demanded a refund of more than $2k for products that had already been removed from your original invoice once it was updated.

Even though the renovation was nearly complete, and additional work was already done for you, we were never paid for any of this work. You even insisted on filing a lawsuit rather than finding an amicable resolution or paying for completed work. We did not go back to the project for this sensible reason.

After reading her review and our response, let me ask - would you have gone back to finish the work knowing with absolute certainty that you wouldn t be paid? This is a conundrum that contractors are often faced with. Imagine going to work at a 9-5 job and having to file a lien or hire a debt collection agency to get paid for the work you ve already completed.

Of course it is not in our interest to put our customers in a stressful situation. We try to be accommodating to customers needs and financial situations. However, leaving to another province for a month, and refusing to pay change-orders, obviously made the work much more difficult.

It s important for us to note that we were very public about our name change. We specialize in selling beautiful pre-curated bathroom renovations, aka models , hence the name change. We gather reviews from customers and do our own inspections of each project to give an unbiased opinion about the events that occurred. This empowers customers with information that isn t otherwise publicly available. You can check out our website for some of our completed projects with before-and-after photos, customer-quoted reviews, and the pre-curated models.

Response from Acoutera Renovations

Thank you Jennifer for taking the time to share your opinion on our services. However, we feel it important to clarify many facts that were left out during the writing of this review.

We would like to be the first to note that the project photos on our website are indeed real projects we have taken on. We employ two professional photographers who attend our job sites after projects are completed to take photos.

As an example, a link to pictures of Jennifer's completed bathroom can be found here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1k2Iu46UfCeTNqWYXuw83iErQolmLfkOh?usp=sharing

While we were on the site last she had agreed that it looked beautiful.

Some of the images seen on our "Models" page are realistic 3D renders, and some that live in our design studio are meant to act as inspiration. All of the images on our "Projects" page are indeed images and videos of projects that we have completed.

Jennifer had made the decision to engage us back in October of 2019 to complete one full bathroom renovation and one powder room renovation - our specialty. We spent a significant period of time assisting her on product decisions and together we created a beautiful design with hexagon tile through the bathroom. As soon as we were ready, we began the installation process and neared completion by the end of the third week.

It was after we were nearing completion that Jennifer made the decision that the tiles were slightly too off-white. She insisted that we rip out all of the work and redo them with a different set of tiles.

Although the tiles were the exact ones specified in our contract, we wanted to do our part to ensure the client was satisfied. We spent over 2 weeks visiting every tile store in the greater Vancouver area to find a "perfect white" hexagon tile. Nothing met the clients requirements so we agreed with Jennifer that we would select a different type of tile.

These tiles needed to be custom ordered from Toronto and took an additional month for delivery, further delaying the project beyond initially planned. Upon arrival, we promptly installed them. This is when we ran into more troubles.

The vanity we had agreed upon over email arrived damaged. We returned it to our supplier and received a replacement, which also arrived damaged.

Together with Jennifer, we both agreed to instead make a custom vanity free of charge. The process required to design and fabricate a custom vanity takes time, this resulted in further delays.

Further unavoidable issues occurred throughout the renovation process that further delayed our project.

The client got COVID-19, and thus could not visit the countertop store to check the colour of the countertops (We did not want to install them without approval in the event that we would run into the same instance as the tiles). Following recovery, the client refused to visit the countertop store to select her countertop.

When we got to the end of the project, the only remaining item was the vanity countertop.

However, the final invoice was never paid, with over $11,000 outstanding she proceeded to take legal action over alleged damages that we caused to her property (A screw through one of her walls) We settled privately with the agreement that we would not pay for any alleged damages and she would not have to pay her final invoice.

We had also agreed to give her additional compensation for the cost of the tiles as an act of goodwill.

Throughout the process, we worked tirelessly to make Jennifer happy and although from her initial review this may sound to the contrary. We have taken steps to refine our process and ensure that we hold our company, our contractors and our suppliers to an even higher standard than before.

Response from Acoutera Renovations

Thanks for the great review Nick! It was a pleasure working for you.