Custom Homes

“We bought a little bungalow in March 2008 and were planning on renovating it and adding a second story. Once we got into the nitty gritty of everything, as far as the kind of building we wanted, we ran into some zoning issues. Gary Palmer and Bob Porter, the architect he worked with, went above and beyond to work with us in getting the variance with the city squared away. Once that was all settled, there were more issues with the original house. We had initially had inspectors and structural engineers look at the property, but when Gary looked at the nuts and bolts of correcting the existing issues and adding a second level, it became very costly. We then visited the idea of tearing down the existing home and building new, which is what we did.

Throughout the whole process, the Palmers were very honest and open about everything. They are great communicators; I never had to wonder about what was going on. We had weekly meetings, and we would talk at least a couple of times during the week, so they were very good about keeping us in the loop. We had never done any kind of major renovation or built a house before, and we really appreciated that they went the extra mile to explain things to us and to give us options. Everyone we talked to before the process said, ‘You’re going to hate your contractor.’ Securing the variance with the City was a long, tedious process — but the part where we were supposed to be dissatisfied with the contractor never came about. You always hear about contractors taking longer than they estimate, but they actually were much shorter. We kept saying that this is not the bad experience that everyone warned us about … It turned out even better than we thought.”