Jdsi

I am building a house and needed an engineer to approve the architect’s designs. While seeking out a suitable engineer, I quickly discovered the ones within the city of Houston were very expensive. I came across online JDSI and was immediately impressed by their website: It’s sleek and does a great job conveying what they do and even gives the impression they’ve been around for a while. My General Contractor and I interviewed James Deaver on the phone and felt comfortable with him. I sent him the money he required and my architect provided him the designs he needed. Communication with James quickly proved to be a challenge as he would not respond to e-​mails and I would have to send him several texts to get an update on the progress of my designs. He would tell me they would be ready by a specific time but then they would not be ready. And instead of giving me a heads up, he would just wait until I inquired about the designs and we’d go through it all over again. Finally, I received them. I made the mistake of not going over them with my architect prior to paying the balance for the signed plans. I appears that JDSI had completely ignored the suggested plans of the architect and redesigned the entire foundation. The result required more materials and labor to build as well as design changes by the architect because they pushed the design out of code. Trying to get to bottom of the problem proved to be a challenge and James didn’t really seem that interested in helping us understand the problem. Though I understand the engineer is the one with the final word, James never let us know there was a problem which never gave us an opportunity to address it with the architect before the designs were complete. Nor did he ever communicate with the architect. This part bothered me the most because it seems that the architect and the engineer should be working together in some capacity. We took the initiative and had a sit down with James about the designs. He pulled in an architect from another firm to go over the issue regarding the foundation, which seemed odd to me that James himself was not taking ownership of the problem and explaining the issue to us. The result of the sit down was the discovery that they missed a very simple feature the architect had included in his designs, that if noticed, would not have required the design changes they suggested. James did offer to revise the designs the way we wanted them but my GC and I both felt very uncomfortable moving forward with them as we lost confidence in their firm; mostly due to the lack of communication. If James communicated and gave us the impression he wanted to work with us, we would have had more confidence. We felt we needed a second pair of eyes to look over the work. I asked James for a 50% refund and he refused, so I feel the need to set this review in motion. Had he refunded at least half the fee, I would have been satisfied with the outcome.