My search for a designer was difficult from the start. I knew what I wanted to do with my house, and the designers recommended to me via Qanvast felt like a random assortment of cocky, unpleasant people. Of the lot, Jermaine seemed to listen to what my husband and I said we needed, and she was very positive, assuaging our anxieties about the extent of renovations needed to achieve what we wanted. In the end I narrowed down my choices to a boutique design firm and Jermaine. Jermaine was a tiny bit cheaper, and my husband thought she had a calmer, more maternal vibe about her so he persuaded me to engage her.
The start of renovations was relatively straightforward, a lot of hacking needed to be done, and the foundation needed to be built back up before moving onto finer details. When we finally began discussing carpentry, I realised there was a problem - Jermaine never listened to what we said we wanted. We would text, meet in person and provide all kinds of details, but she never reflected what we asked for in her proposed designs. For example, my husband wanted our sliding doors to look like shoji screens, but Jermaine ignored our requests and kept pushing a design using thin wooden “fins”, in her words. When I asked her why our requests were never taken into account, she got defensive and said that if I wanted her to blindly follow instructions instead of doing her job as a designer, she could shut off and follow blindly. I was shocked by this response, and since I didn’t mean to offend her I decided to use her suggested design even though it was not to our taste. Perhaps she had a better sense of how everything would tie in together.
The next big issue was when I began losing faith in Jermaine’s capabilities. My husband and I have very clear wardrobe needs. We wanted everything to be hanging space only, with a small section of drawers and shelves. Again and again we would explain this to Jermaine, only to receive technical drawings getting further and further away from what we wanted. She kept pushing a 50-50 split between hanging and drawer space which was not at all what we wanted. I did an AutoCAD drawing of the wardrobe configuration myself and told her to just follow that. She sent us back a completely different drawing, this time with unnecessary features like a second Hafele rack system. I gave up trying to communicate further on wardrobe details and decided to outsource those pieces to a 3rd party who would listen to me.
From then on things went further downhill. She would demand (not ask) to meet on various mornings to go through various plans, and it was frustrating because even on the spot she would forget what I said within minutes, and I would have to correct her plans in front of her workmen before they understood what exactly I was asking for. She would suggest 5 things at a time (like various box-ups), and I would say I must think about it before deciding. Then I would go to the house only to find she had installed various box-ups without confirming with me. I was always implied to be in the wrong, because there was never a paper trail of various decisions made or confirmed.
Anytime I confronted Jermaine on a decision I disagreed with she was extremely defensive and borderline rude. My husband and I had several conversations about whether or not this was a strange experience, and we decided that Jermaine is just “nyanyuk”, senile and struggles to keep track of things. I too am a designer, and I tried being sympathetic, so I thought we should try to be patient with human error.
The absolute final straw for me was when I realised I had approved a cabinet measurement incorrectly. I asked for the height of our tile backsplash to be altered (1 extra row of tiles to be added above) and to adjust the top cabinets accordingly. As usual, Jermaine’s first instinct was to say “NO” and make various excuses that made no sense. When I insisted that this was a change that needed to be made, even if it was my fault and I needed to pay for it, she said “We can’t be going to and fro with tiling work and mess up the house now”. In my frustration, I said that the extra-short backsplash she was insisting I accept showed lack of pride in her work finishes. If she had been defensive and rude to me anytime before this, it was nothing compared to what happened here. She mocked my shorter countertop heights (I am only 5 feet tall and requested lower countertops for better comfort), along with other requests I had made. She was sulky and petulant, and even when I apologised for my unnecessary remark she spoke like a child asking for more praise and apology. Then she said she would update me the next day (Saturday). The next day when I checked for these updates, she said she didn’t want to talk until Monday. My husband and I had to devise a scripted apology through him, before she would be civil to me. My husband had to pretend to apologise for his wife, before she would continue to perform, and even then she made it seem like she was doing us an incredible favour instead of doing a $120k job.
By this time I reduced communication with Jermaine to only when necessary. Except then we realised there were days going by where nothing was happening in the house. When we asked what was planned, she would say something was happening the next day. When we came the next day and saw no change she would say she changed the day to another day. I was in complete despair by then, because now my designer was not only bad at executing our requests, but she now stopped sending updates on works happening in our house. I felt held at ransom because I was afraid to confront her about this. She is her own boss at this design firm, and no one can make her do what she doesn’t want to do. Several times I contacted Qanvast staff, asking them to step in, only to change my mind because I was so scared of Jermaine stopping work and delaying things even further. My handover was supposed to happen 1st December, but the date came and went with no word or explanation, and the house was still incomplete. One day I went to the house and found the kitchen cabinets had been installed. But they’d been installed with very different measurements from the ones I had approved. She had given me a much thicker top pelmet, which made the cabinet proportions look ugly and awful. The handles I had bought for this no longer fit onto the doors. She had also decided to remove part of the pelmet, making one of the shelves extra high, too high for any of my family members to reach. I confronted her about this because I had clearly approved a drawing but was given a different end product. She said she made these decisions to help me, out of the goodness of her heart. She said one of my light fixtures needed extra clearance height, so she made my pelmet thicker. But she had never, ever brought this up to me. When I asked why she hadn’t even talked to me about these changes she felt were necessary, she told me to just accept it. Now she was condescending and said my issues with the differences were ridiculous. I was furious with her, but she refused to budge on the matter. She insisted there was an email or message indicating the change in measurement but sure enough, she never found it (because it doesn’t exist).
When we ran checks through the house, we found that many details didn’t align. For example, there is a shower screen track that serves no purpose, because the sliding glass door doesn’t go into it. It hits the wall 2 inches away from the wall track. Another wall track went all the way up to the ceiling, looking rusty and dirty. I had told her and her tiler in person to only install this track up to the height of the screens, but of course this was ignored. When my husband confronted her on the poor finishes, she constantly blamed me, saying I had agreed to make these lousy decisions. I had no defense, because these were conversations we had in person and once again, I had no paper trail to prove I had never approved certain details.
We were so relieved when the final window was changed. My family spent a good week cleaning up the house, making it habitable and moving in new furniture. I knew Jermaine had a couple more items to install, so we asked her to make sure her men were more careful about dirt in the house, because we were closing it as a jobsite and making it a home now. When I went to the house after her men had been in, my walls were covered in black handprints, scratches on the walls, there was debris and wood everywhere, and even outside my house in the common hallway there was debris and cut up electrical wires strewn all over the place. My bathroom mats were filthy and looked like they had been used to wipe up floors and mess. I was so upset by the lack of care about my home, I changed my house password and insisted that Jermaine/ her men only be allowed into the house if one of the home owners was also present. She stopped responding to our messages. Her finance representative ended up taking over the last leg of renovations, and even he was shocked by many of the poor finishes in the house. Holes in grouting, chunks of cement hidden behind things, backsplashes that left big gaps between counter and wall.
Even at the end, when going through defects and rectifications the firm was very resistant to fixing everything my husband and I listed. Again and again I kept hearing lines about how they sympathised with me and my frustrations, but there was nothing they could do to fill gaps in their work. They even acknowledged their workmanship was poor, but reiterated there was nothing they could do. Their tilework had many, many holes in grouting, and I told them specifically that I wanted all the grout in floorwork filled out. However, when I checked, there were still holes in areas and they had skipped the bathrooms entirely, saying we hadn't specifically highlighted the issues in "the basin area", only the shower area. Complete nonsense, because I never separated the 2 areas, and always made it clear there were issues in the bathrooms in general.
I am so disappointed with Seven Heaven, Jermaine and her poor ethic and workmanship. She oversold everything in early stages of discussions,only to forget details and try to shift blame to someone else. She would say yes to everything, only to find it wasn’t doable later on, at which point she would try talking us out of what we wanted by saying we could save money by not pursuing this. As time passed she shifted from a Yes Woman to a No Woman, rejecting every request before fully digesting the works involved. We got the strong sense that she just didn't want to prolong work, even if it was something meaningful and important to us that we would pay for. She also NEVER gave me a Variation Order to acknowledge before works were done. She would just install things and only weeks later send a VO asking my to sign it, as if I had any choice now that the works had already gone up. I refused to even acknowledge the 2nd VO because she had installed window grilles that cost over $2000 more than what was indicated in the original quote. When her finance guy pressed me to acknowledge it I told him there was no point because I absolutely did not approve it. They had also left $4900 worth of false ceiling work that was never done in the quote, and I had to point it out before it was removed. Our budget ballooned up and down, because everytime we thought she has saved us money to spend on another nice feature in the house, she would come back and say she had forgotten, and we would have to fork out more money to stay on top of things. The workmanship isn't even great in the end, it's a solid 2/10 rating.
She was manipulative and dishonest, and extremely unpleasant to deal with. I cannot believe her firm is featured on Qanvast, and I cannot believe my bad luck being recommended such a terrible designer for my forever home (she also kept saying we would benefit “when we sell the house” when we said again and again that we intended to live and die with the flat). The worst part was she was never apologetic about delivering us a house that made us lose sleep and cry (for all the wrong reasons). Some days all we wanted was an acknowledgement of her mistakes and a simple apology. I have never wished so much ill on a person before, but now there’s Jermaine, the embodiment of bad work.
