ECD Reviews from Eastside and Seattle Homeowners

★★★★★ · Wall removal

We wanted the kitchen wall gone and three contractors gave us three different answers about whether it could go. ECD brought their engineer out on the first visit, found the ceiling joists lapping right over it and showed us the beam that would replace it, with the load it had to carry written on the sketch. The quote matched the final invoice within about two hundred dollars. The sixteen-foot opening looks like it was always there.

★★★★★ · Addition

A full second floor over a 1954 rambler is not a small thing and we were braced for the schedule to slide. It did not. Plan review came back with three comments, their engineer answered all three inside a week and the framing crew was back on site the following Monday. What I appreciated most was that the same project lead answered the phone for eleven months.

★★★★★ · ADU

Our lot slopes hard to the back and every builder we called wanted to flatten it. ECD stepped the cottage into the grade instead, which saved a retaining wall we had been quoted twenty-two thousand for. My mother has been living in it since March and her heating bill is lower than ours.

★★★★★ · Foundation

The crack in our basement wall had been getting a little longer every winter for six years. Their engineer measured it, told us plainly it was settlement and not an emergency, and priced the underpinning in stages so we could do the worst corner first. No scare tactics, which is more than I can say for the first two companies.

★★★★★ · Seismic

A 1926 house in Wallingford, not bolted to anything. The crew worked in a crawlspace I would not go into, bolted the mudsill, added the plywood bracing and left the space cleaner than they found it. The engineer came back before any of it was covered and walked me through every connection with a flashlight.

★★★★★ · Kitchen

We took out a bearing wall and moved the range to the island, so this was as much a structural job as a kitchen. Everything that came out of a wall got written up with a price before anyone kept working — two change orders in four months, both explained in plain English.

★★★☆☆ · Whole-home remodel

The engineering and the finished work were genuinely good; the communication in the middle three weeks was not. Our lead changed once because of a family emergency and nobody told us, so a fortnight of questions went to someone who had not been briefed. It was sorted out after we rang the office and the result is exactly what we wanted, but those weeks were frustrating.