hkk

have to agree with simplehuman and E on the nightmarish experiences. because of Alan, I also quarrelled with my wife many times for choosing to use him and over whether we should ignore / insist on fixing unsatisfactory works. its fine if the workmanship of his team is not up to scratch but his attitude to us is pleasant and willing to talk things out, but shouting at us in our first new home is just totally uncalled for, unfair and out of line. the experience has caused us so much stress, and we are hoping no one else has to go through this a few more days and it will be 4 months since day 1 of renovation and there are things that are still not fixed yet, and ours is only a 1000+ sqf apartment. can you believe this.

Really amazed and envious that meeko had such a good experience with Alan. Does he choose which projects he cares more about and who he treats nicely...? We have always been polite and reasonable with him too but wasn't reciprocated. On most occasions when he came into our place (only at our request, never on his own will btw) he would be in a foul mood which made us scared to request for too much. More than a few questions or comments on the works and you will literally see smoke coming out of his ears It has now reached a stage where we have given up on asking him to help on rectifications and doing our own DIY as much as we can. We just have to accept shoddy work unfortunately and he probably has achieved his aim of frustrating us enough to give up...sigh On what inthechouse said on the good points of Alan, I think responding to messages and not cancelling on meetings is just basic human courtesy in any walks of life and industry

hi, i'm the married partner of one of the contributors to this thread, decided to sign up and join in the discussions. seeing a number of people here who seem to have similar experiences to us makes us feel more comforted that we are not alone on this boat. we thought we were strange! i must say we started off our renovation full of excitement and hope, doing lots of research and planning, even going to places not convenient for us like changi / sungei kadut / loyang / jurong east etc.just to look at materials and designs. we knew renovation was not going to be smooth sailing given it is an iterative process and involves handicraft, but we didn't expect it to be so unpleasant and stressful. we can't put the blame all on one person but have to say a large part of it boils down to the main contractor, Alan. we decided to go with him after reading a couple of good reviews (on hindsight we should have read more, but for some reason even now when you type Alan Tan Contractor / Aian Furniture / Alan Renotalk in google search only the more positive ones come up) and also coz he seemed easy going and not pushy on things he wants to sell you. the other reason is because his pricing was reasonable compared to the rest we got very soon after reno began we started to find that it was hard to communicate properly with him for a few reasons. 1. he doesnt give us a proper schedule or heads up as to what is being done in a specific week, so it becomes very hard to supervise and tell him what we want. there was a time when 30 min notice was given and we had to rush down from work to tell his sub con what we wanted 2. quite often he doesnt ask us what we wanted for example and a number of things was decided for us without consulting us beforehand. a lot of things to him are so called "standard way of doing things" but for goodness sake we hacked everything down, the only standard to follow is the homeowners'. its just simple respect to ask the homeowners what they want for their HOME, isn't it? 3. because of no.2, it turns out that there were things we had to ask him to change as we were not consulted in the first place. so it becomes us being the "troublesome" and "picky" people! being a young couple without any experience in this, we were obviously quite stressed / paiseh to ask him to make those changes, which even caused us to quarrel coz one of us wanted to let it slide and accept his work while the other was insistent on making the changes. we found out the hard way you have to insist on getting things done the way you want in order to get him to do it. 4. lack of supervision. if a contractor is not supervising the works, then are we just paying for his contacts? and if we have to spend so much time and effort to supervise the sub cons, why don't we just spend a little more time to find the contacts of sub cons ourselves and do the whole thing ourself?? yes he is not an ID but we are not asking for designer stuff or 3D drawings or colour / shade matching or theme design are we? there are some redeeming factors to be fair, like he will make changes and rectifications to a certain extent but not without a lot of strong words and haggling with him. for the records, we quarrelled with him more often than we can imagine quarrelling with anyone. on his "good" days he is actually quite willing and accommodating to do things for us in terms of workmanship, his wet works are just not good enough. and we literally picked out over 20 pieces of tiles that needed to be hacked out and redone. and even after that there are some bad areas which we just have to live with. painting was alright but we had to buy our own brushes and rollers to touch up. his electrical people are not bad. again we dont think we are asking for the moon, when all we wanted was walls to be straight, tiles to be aligned properly, cracks on walls to be plastered over, switches to be working? these are basics of any type of reno, aren't they? it's our first home and we are quite bumped that the renovation process was so unpleasant but we keep thinking as long as we persevere we will get the home we want and then can forget abt this person. overall, i feel he is more a businessman trying to close the deal and get paid, rather than a craftsman who takes pride in the work and seeks to satisfy a customer. by the way in response to makan's earlier post, we were quite nice in terms of payments to him too. we kept chasing and asking him when can we meet to pass him the cheque. so yes, being nice to him doesn't mean it gets reciprocated. then we thought, why are we so on time and exact with the payment, when he is not on time and exact with his works? like i said earlier, this thread is very useful for people thinking of engaging him, but a general search on the internet won't get a new homeowner here so wondering what can be done to help people think twice / thrice before engaging him after reading the good reviews that come out on google search.