Affordable Design and Drafting and Permits

Stay far, far away. We hired Bob Belanger for a whole house (interior and exterior) remodel for a house we purchased in Encinitas. Bob is a nice guy and good sales person, but was extremely difficult to work with and amazingly unprofessional.
— Extremely slow.
— Never met his own deadlines («done in 1 week» really means «at least 2 weeks», even for simple tasks).
— Offers unlimited «free» revisions, but understand that each revision will take 1 – 3 weeks even for the smallest changes so understand that you’ll just eventually give up.
— One of the contractors he recommended had a major criminal record that he wasn’t aware of. (waste of time for us to learn about vetting that contractor)
— Lots of basic errors on drawings that we’d have to spend a lot of time double checking and then wait weeks to get fixed. As one example (of many), window dimensions on floor plan didn’t match window dimensions on elevation (for the same window).
— Wildly inaccurate drawings that impacted structural designs that had to be corrected on site.
— Rarely answered the phone. Would go radio silent for days.
— Required payment for extra services that were originally included.
— He outsources much of the work to low cost partners which is I’m guessing is why the work quality is low and the process is extremely slow.
— Never had any follow on visits to the job site as he said he would.
I could go on, but that’s all I can think of from memory right now. It has been many months since we’ve had to work Bob Belanger, but my memory of dealing with him at the beginning of our project is still so strongly negative that I was compelled to write this review. When we hired Bob, there were no online reviews to warn us away. After we hired him, we found one negative review on Unilocal,but by then it was too late for us. That negative review appears to be removed from Unilocal now but was spot on with our experience. The single positive review here sounds nothing like the Bob Belanger we worked with.
Our house is done now and it turned out nice, but of the 30+ contractors, sub-​contractors, and vendors we worked with on this project, Bob was by far our worst experience.
–Steve

I had Bob work on a complex room addition. I live on a hill and the roof of the room addition was also going to be the driveway. This required technical knowledge and willingness to work closely with the city permitting office, engineers and building inspectors. We found Bob to be responsive, full of ideas, remarkably energetic and he always picked up his phone.
At one point the building inspector red flagged a wall as an incomplete nailing for a shear wall. We had to demonstrate to the city that it was acting only as a curtain wall. Within 2 hours Bob had written the clarifying document that swayed the city engineers.
Near the end of the project an existing grade beam unexpectedly snapped in half at a critical time pressure moment. We had Bob on the phone before the dust even settled. Bob dropped everything and conference called his engineer and the contractor and they where able to talk the contractor through the replacement design on the phone.
The room turned out awesome and bright. We were worried, with all the thick concrete walls, concrete ceiling and north side of the house, that it might be a dark space. The strategically placed windows and glass block actually made it one of our brightest rooms.