Paramax Homes - Custom Home Builders
1 review 1571 Marine Dr, West Vancouver, BC +1 604-281-2232 www.paramaxhomes.com suggest an edit
27 August 2023 10:05
Behind the scenes, what consumers don’t see or hear
True character is shown on how problems are handled when they occur.
I’m a sub contractor, I did the levelling on 3 floors of a Paramax house on Millstream in west van.
What this means is that after the structural slabs are poured, I come in and make them level with a self levelling cement so that when the floor covering, in this case, glue down engineered hardwood, goes down, there’s no waves or bounces in the floor. It also provides consistent reveals along floor to ceiling windows, baseboards, millwork and more.
Paramax understands the importance of a level floor so there was no issue in providing a level substrate and getting paid for it.
Now here lies the problem. With every build, there’s settling and sagging of suspended slabs. In this case the second floor, a suspended slab, had substantially sagged after I had levelled it. This was clearly an engineering issue. There are horizontal tension tears through my leveller after it had dried, (shown in pics). You can also see cracks in the ceiling when you’re down on the first floor, almost as if a section of the slab is falling away from the rest. (As shown in pic).
As a result, the floor was no longer level. I had brought this matter to Alex the superintendent, and he was baffled why the floor wasn’t level, avoiding the engineering flaw. He then blamed me that I didn’t level the floor properly. I asked him how can the floor be level up to a new crack then drop rather significantly on the other side of the crack? How can I do that with a leveller? His answer, “ I don’t know”…
He also tried to educate me that this linear crack is caused by shrinkage. Wrong again Alex, shrinkage cracks appear like spider webs. Still avoiding the engineering mistake like the plague. This is not incompetence, at least I hope it’s not, it’s a problem that’s going to eat away at his and Eshan, the project managers’ bonus.
Let me quickly explain, every job has a budget, if the PM can complete the job under that budget, the difference, what ever they agree on, is split between the owner and PM. So when unaccounted expenses occur, if they can’t take it from the client, they cut into their “bonuses” to cover the costs.
I then approached the Eshan about the problem, knowing for sure with concrete evidence that he’ll understand. Well, he too blamed the levelling on me, and said in a polite way, “ fix it, and we’ll figure it out”.
I’ve been doing this for 23 years, so I didn’t take too kindly about being accused on an engineering problem so I took pictures and videos of the settling, but still ended up fixing the problem not knowing if I’d get paid for this remedial work or not.
On the last day of touch ups, they were still blaming this issue on me and I still continuously pointed out the real problem. They didn’t want to hear it anymore so they kicked me off the site. 7 months later I haven’t been paid for this engineering mistake, there’s a lien on the house, and non of them, Eshan, want to take care of their lies.
This happens all too often with hard working trades. The bill was only 3k, to them it’s nothing, to me, it’s more baseball opportunities for my 13yo.
Anyways, thanks to anyone that spent the time to go through and read all this. I’ll be posting videos on this on my TikTok @zero2orien.
True character is shown on how problems are handled when they occur.
I’m a sub contractor, I did the levelling on 3 floors of a Paramax house on Millstream in west van.
What this means is that after the structural slabs are poured, I come in and make them level with a self levelling cement so that when the floor covering, in this case, glue down engineered hardwood, goes down, there’s no waves or bounces in the floor. It also provides consistent reveals along floor to ceiling windows, baseboards, millwork and more.
Paramax understands the importance of a level floor so there was no issue in providing a level substrate and getting paid for it.
Now here lies the problem. With every build, there’s settling and sagging of suspended slabs. In this case the second floor, a suspended slab, had substantially sagged after I had levelled it. This was clearly an engineering issue. There are horizontal tension tears through my leveller after it had dried, (shown in pics). You can also see cracks in the ceiling when you’re down on the first floor, almost as if a section of the slab is falling away from the rest. (As shown in pic).
As a result, the floor was no longer level. I had brought this matter to Alex the superintendent, and he was baffled why the floor wasn’t level, avoiding the engineering flaw. He then blamed me that I didn’t level the floor properly. I asked him how can the floor be level up to a new crack then drop rather significantly on the other side of the crack? How can I do that with a leveller? His answer, “ I don’t know”…
He also tried to educate me that this linear crack is caused by shrinkage. Wrong again Alex, shrinkage cracks appear like spider webs. Still avoiding the engineering mistake like the plague. This is not incompetence, at least I hope it’s not, it’s a problem that’s going to eat away at his and Eshan, the project managers’ bonus.
Let me quickly explain, every job has a budget, if the PM can complete the job under that budget, the difference, what ever they agree on, is split between the owner and PM. So when unaccounted expenses occur, if they can’t take it from the client, they cut into their “bonuses” to cover the costs.
I then approached the Eshan about the problem, knowing for sure with concrete evidence that he’ll understand. Well, he too blamed the levelling on me, and said in a polite way, “ fix it, and we’ll figure it out”.
I’ve been doing this for 23 years, so I didn’t take too kindly about being accused on an engineering problem so I took pictures and videos of the settling, but still ended up fixing the problem not knowing if I’d get paid for this remedial work or not.
On the last day of touch ups, they were still blaming this issue on me and I still continuously pointed out the real problem. They didn’t want to hear it anymore so they kicked me off the site. 7 months later I haven’t been paid for this engineering mistake, there’s a lien on the house, and non of them, Eshan, want to take care of their lies.
This happens all too often with hard working trades. The bill was only 3k, to them it’s nothing, to me, it’s more baseball opportunities for my 13yo.
Anyways, thanks to anyone that spent the time to go through and read all this. I’ll be posting videos on this on my TikTok @zero2orien.