Highly recommend!
We undertook a big project – demolition of an old extension, double floor extension, garage conversion, internal remodelling and full refurbishment including re-plaster, re-wire and re-plumb. We were complete novices so spoke to 6+ different building firms to get quotes, and Proficiency were the most impressive from the start. Their dedicated contract manager Phil worked with us in detail which is what we wanted, always giving quick responses and never pushing us to just get started and worry about the details later, which is what we experienced with some other firms. Having Phil manage the quoting stage is a real bonus.
Our project started just as the first Covid national lockdown began (to the day!) which was hugely stressful. Proficiency were amazing during this period. The site shut down for just a couple of days while we all figured out what was going on, but after that things carried on as normal and Proficiency progressed the project at a speedy pace despite the obvious difficulties.
We had a mixture of management from Jimmy (managing some of it through the lockdown), Viktor (our site manager) and Toby (our project manager). Jimmy is great at picking things up and it was reassuring to have the owner across things during the difficult lockdown period. He was happy to meet us on site on Saturdays to talk through the progress. We mainly dealt with Viktor and Toby after that who we really liked and developed a good relationship with over the course of the build. We really valued their input and ideas. They were happy to have site meetings in the evenings after our working day, and took time to go over everything. They are just very nice people who are easy to get along with and work with and who you feel you can trust, and that’s who you want to be working with doing something like this. They also both have a great sense of humour which is important in a stressful project like ours.
There were inevitably frustrations and disagreements at points along the way, as is to be expected in a big and complicated project, but we were always able to sort these out with Proficiency and come to a reasonable solution whereas we could see that with the wrong building firm disagreements could escalate quite easily.
Proficiency really care about the final result – they want it to look amazing too, and that really comes across in the detail they go into and the advice they offered as we worked through the project. They are also really great about coming back to sort anything that isn’t quite right – they are not the sort of firm to just do the job and never be in touch again.
On doing a big project generally, I would say do not underestimate how time-consuming and stressful juggling the finances and your job/other commitments all at the same time can be. When you’re opening up a house in the way we did there will be things that come up that have to be dealt with that you didn’t budget for. The more you’re opening up, the more problems there are likely to be, so you really need to have a healthy contingency, plus another contingency for ‘optional extras’ that will come along the way and at the time won’t feel optional when you’re pouring your heart and soul (and all your savings!) into it.
In summary, we would absolutely recommend Proficiency to everyone and we hope to use them again in the future. Our home has been beautifully done and we love it. Many people who have come round, including tradespeople, have commented on the high standard of the work. Every day we are still being wowed by it and we can see that if you choose the wrong builders that could easily not be the case. Having worked with Proficiency for over a year we very much trust them and we also know they would always do a wonderful job.
Highly recommend – five stars!