This review is a long time coming. We recommend Ben, our project manager Ozzie, and CID to all of our friends and neighbors who ask, because everything about our experience with them was the opposite of the horror stories that we heard from our friends about general contractors.

Price – Ben gave us a very detailed estimate of price for our project (which was major) at the very beginning, and stuck to it. He was super transparent about when things were due, and how much we would owe at every step. No hidden costs. Amazing.

Architect – you know the old ‘my architect won’t work with a certain city’ (in our case, Glendale) thing? Or ‘my architect and GC hate each other’ thing? Didn’t happen for us, because Ben has his own architect working for him. WHAT?? Honestly this was one of the many key reasons we picked CID, and one of the reasons our project went so well. No conflict, no design miscommunications, no disagreements on what should go where.

The Glendale thing – so there are a few cities in LA that are notorious for being difficult to work with…Glendale (where we live) is one of them. I don’t know how, but we were never delayed significantly by permitting or inspection issues. I think this boiled down to a couple things: Ben and Ozzie are organized and know the process really well. They can time things perfectly, and also know how to efficiently manage what is being worked on and when so that if one area is waiting for an inspection/permit, progress is still being made in another area.

Quality – see pictures. We got to pick all the details of what we wanted, and got to say what we wanted in our redesign. We love our house

Communication – Ben and Ozzie were always accessible and responsive. Ozzie speaks like 1,000 different languages (clearly exaggerating, but it’s a lot), which is really helpful as a PM. A couple things got lost in translation between us, Ben, Ozzie, and the folks who came to do the work, but that is to be expected with such a large project.

Timing – they got started on the project right away, and were done by our deadline (when our old lease was up).

The one issue we encountered was with one of the vendors…they were a bit subpar. But every other vendor we used through Ben was amazing and kind. Also, when Ben found out the subpar vendor wasn’t on top of things, he intervened and they shaped up real quick XD

All in all, we highly recommend CID. Ben and Ozzie were honest, transparent, and communicative. Honestly the best tell is that we are still friends, still text them for recommendations of vendors, and will absolutely be using them for “phase 2” of work on our house, whenever that may happen!!