EcoCraft Homes

Ecocraft homes says all the right things but could not perform at the level they promised. As wonderful a home they say they can build, I was hopeful they would rise to the occasion and be able to manage the constrution of my passive home, with prefab construction. Our project together up through final pricing, dragged on beyond their schedule, was priced much higher than initially budgeted, and caused me to incur additional fees because of their inability to oversee and magage the project and their prefab builder, SMI. I provided them with mostly complete architectural drawings which we had altered for a prefab build (converting the house into boxes to be built in factory and delivered by truck). With these updated architectual drawings, their manufacturer, SMI, produced inaccurate shop drawings that caused me to incur additional architectural fees because EcoCraft didn’t adequately review the plans, and missed key errors that my architect uncovered. The limited capabilities of SMI to construct a high quality, finish, one story living space on foundation, passive style home in their factory, with non-toxic materials, using an exterior cedar wood finish, was too complex. Much of the exterior insulation and siding finish work, would have had to be performed on site, minimizing the benefit of prefab construction. Ecocraft wanted money up front for estimating the job, which is unusual for construction companies. When I cancelled the project after five and a half months of back and forth, after losing confidence in the ability to build my designed house, they kept most of the deposit money I had provided, charging me for their estimating time, including the shop drawing work at SMI that was inaccurate.. Additionally, they wanted to use a contract which was typical of a low quality tract home builder and they weren’t able to address important terms which would be more typically found in a contract for a custom home, prefab or not. High quality contractors don’t function that way. When pricing was finalized, their attempt to bill me as a typical home contractor, showed no cost savings to traditional home construction, as they had said would occur. The prefab home would have actually cost me more money than typical home construction project. Yes, I would have saved construction time, but at the pace the project was moving, the time savings would have only been a few months. As much as I wanted to build a prefab home with Ecocraft, I cannot recommend their services and suggest that for those interested in using this company hire their own architect, have an attorney to help with contract negotiations, set a specific timeline, not provide a preliminary construction pricing deposit and beware of the pitfalls of using this building.

May 2018

Wonderful Team of talented home builders. Very conscious of your needs. They build amazing custom homes and are great people!