Newell's Designs

We hired Newell in August of 2014. We came to him with some black line drawings and a 3 ring binder (our house bible) of our ideas in hopes that he could produce working plans of our dream house. Boy, were we wrong. We should have known this was going to be a huge nightmare when he consistently refused to listen to our ideas and continued to add his own spin to our dream home. Our house bible was returned to us with half the pages missing and a half eaten hamburger in it. Disgusting ... I know. So fast forward 4 months... Yes 4 months and still no plans to send to the engineering company. We finally get plans in January and the engineering company we are using can not engineer the plans because the roof lines that have been drawn are not physically possible to create. So our engineering firm contacts Newell to let him know. He in turn changes the roof lines and it completely changes our elevation. Did he tell us about it...no. We find out after we have paid the engineering firm 1000s of dollars for house plans that look nothing like we were shown. Guess what Newell's response was, "Sorry there's nothing I can do." Really? Because I'm pretty sure your the one who designed this house! So after threatening him with lawyers he decides he's going to "fix" it. After his so called "fix" he sends us a very rude email about how appreciative we should be because he took time from his busy schedule to go back over our plans and how he's not going to charge us. Funny thing is, we paid him over $8000 for plans that weren't technically ours. His fix was not a fix, more of a band aid on paper. So here we are today, April 2015. We have had to halt framing a few times because his plans are so messed up. I understand things can be "fixed in the field" as they say in the builder world but when something is going to cost you an extra $20,000 in the field to get it to look like your building designer had promised... I think there is a problem. So we contact Newell and his response is " not my problem" but I can come look at it for $350 an hour. Really...like we are to pay you anymore for something that should have been fixed the first go round. My point here is, be very weary of this building designer. He is very unprofessional, likes quick fixes and refuses to take responsibility for his errors. I would not recommend him to my worst enemy. No one deserves to go through the hell he has put us through.

Newell has won many awards and is very professional! He made sure I had everything I asked for in my design. I am extremely happy with my experience with him.