Vreugdenhil Bouw

De afgelopen twee maanden hebben de mannen van Vreugdenhil Bouw bij mij een geveloptrekking/uitbouw in Utrecht gerealiseerd. Ik ben zeer tevreden over het proces en het resultaat en raad ze zeker aan. Oscar bood een scherpe offerte vooraf en de communicatie was meteen prettig. Hij had al op relatief korte termijn ruimte (enkele maanden voor gewenste startdatum). Er was wat vertraging rondom de vergunningaanvraag (tussen mij en gemeente), maar in goed overleg konden we iets later starten. Tijdens de bouw zijn twee vaste timmermannen (Wessel & Joël) mijn aanspreekpunt geweest die bijna dagelijks zelf ook meebouwden en bij moeilijkere logistieke vragen of meerwerk schakelde ik met de voorman Bart. Ook de andere onderaannemers waren prettig in de omgang en leverden goed werk. Ze zijn allemaal vriendelijk en oplossingsgericht geweest. De facturatie verliep netjes zoals afgesproken en de (beperkte) onderdelen meerwerk die ik voor rekening kreeg, waren voor mij goed te volgen en ook afgestemd. Kortom, ik zou ze zo weer voor een klus vragen! Zie de foto's voor het mooie resultaat.

I do not like writing bad reviews(*), especially because several of the employees are friendly, but ultimately the truth is that you should avoid Vreugdenhil Bouw for big jobs. It is of course impossible to give here a comprehensive account of the >1 year long drama that our house renovation was, but we had countless problems with them (new walls are not straight, rooms layout and architects drawing are casually ignored, doors do not shut, tiles are badly cut, sealant and roofing had to be re-done several times,…). At some point we unexpectedly had no hot water for a while and had to shower at the neighbours, for no other reason than them simply forgetting to liaise with Stedin for months. Our experience is similar to that of the other unhappy reviewer: the core activity is timber work and this is ok, but Oscar sells a full package (electricity, plumbing, roofing, tiling, etc...) and he simply cannot deliver. The contractors often change and many do poor quality work, we actually had to find a few ourselves and/or do their job (e.g. spent hours to remove the first terrible sealing job so that the second guy could have a go). One of the competent contractors that eventually came to re-do the sealing work told us it was the first time he worked with Vreugdenhil but that it would be the last because he could not believe what he was seeing. I would like to stress this is not my first building job and I understand many issues can and will arise, but many of the ones we had with Vreugdenhil Bouw were due to an unbelievable and almost comical amount of incompetence (e.g. sloping the balcony so that we had a big pond when it rained, or telling us for weeks that a crucial part was arriving soon only to realise that they hadn't actually ordered it and then ordering the wrong one...). But perhaps the biggest problem is that Oscar wants to believe he delivers high quality work and doesn't like to be pointed out that wasn't the case, no matter how egregious the issues are. He doesn't seem to understand he is accountable for all the services he sold and ultimately he will go silent and hide behind Jan - a man we don’t know and who wasn’t involved in our project but who probably thinks of himself as a tough business guy for being constantly rude and denying any accountability. In any case, whatever the problem, Oscar seems unable to consider the possibility he could be part of it. For instance, it became clear there were many serious mistakes in the invoices we were sent (e.g. almost double the number of doors were being charged) and we had to spend hours correcting them. We don’t believe these mistakes were intentional, rather they were just a symptom of how Vreugdenhil Bouw struggled with the complexity of our project. But for Oscar, instead of being recognised as a mistake on their end, this is interpreted as “the customers are being difficult with payment and/or trying to get a discount” - so not only did we never receive an apology but were later told Vreugdenhil Bouw had shown a lot of patience and goodwill in agreeing to update the invoices. In short: even though they appear as mostly friendly, Vreugdenhil Bouw has a lot of maturing to do in order to become a professional and trustworthy building company. (*) what pushed me over was that after they built an entire new floor and resurfaced all the existing balconies (after several tries…), a leak appeared in our roof and yet they had the nerves to claim it was “an existing issue” and to ask for payment to fix it.