America's Home Place, Galveston office Fraudulent billing, over billing, breach of contract, misrepresentation, lack of communication Galveston Texas

Building your dream house should be a great experience, but with America's Home Place, it is a nightmare.  

We gave them our house plans in January. They quoted us one price. When we arrived for our meeting in April, they had not finished the bid, and kept us waiting for almost 2 hours while they threw it together.  The bid was then 100,000.00 over what they had originally said it would be.  Our contract starts with one of their floor plans, even though they claim to be a "custom home builder", and then adds and subtracts items from their floor plan to modify it to fit our plans that were drawn up by an archetect.  Some things are just scratched out with a pen.

The building process has been full of over charges, shoddy workmanship, and lack of communication.  They pointed the house directly North, after we has specified Northeast at several seperate meetings.  I gave them compass headings for the front and back of the house, and the permit application to the city even says that the orientation of the house will be Northeast.

They charged us for one more gas line than they installed in the house. That's only the beginning of the charges for which no work is actually being done. We are paying over $1,000 for a bathroom vanity with a mirror in our contract, but they are not installing it.  

I told our project manager that we would be installing a showwer in that bath, and requested that mortar board be put on the walls up the the ceiling. He told me that was not a problem. The walls were then only mortar boarded up to 4 feet, with the rest sheet rock, and now he can't remember that conversation. The outlet for the hot and cold water piping for that bath/shower comes out of the wall about 3 inches off the floor.

That's typical. Everything that's not in writing that doesn't hapen gets the response that they don't remember that conversation.  The lot of them must have significant memory problems, or maybe that's just a bad case of cover their a*s.

The lighting fixtures cost was not deducted from the cost of the house, but they have no intention of installing any light fixtures.  The cost for toilets was also not subtracted, but they aren't going to install those either.  Same with ceiling fans, smoke alarms, and even finishing out things like painting the outside of the front door, but not the inside!

The work that has been done has been substandard, and we've asked for several things to be redone.  At least once, they said it had been redone when it hadn't.  

Finally, they waited until October to contact the power company and gas company.  Those companies should have been contacted in July or August, and now we are having to pay month by month rent, because our house doesn't have any power.  We were supposed to move in October, but because they didn't get the power run to our house when it should have been done, we probably won't get to move until Feburary. The gas and power company both told me that 6-8 weeks is standard for getting those things hooked up.

I wold never recommend this company to anyone.  I wish we had gone somewhere else.  Building the whole thing ourselves would probably have been easier than dealing with America's Home Place.  I even started a Twitter feed about them, hoping to get some improvement in their customer service.