Baum Construction & Development

I met with and received 5 bids from licensed general contractors to rebuild a garage with an attached laundry room due to a fire believed to have been caused by a dryer. The bid was for approximately $ 46,000 and I decided to go with Michael Baum because of his thoroughness in his written contract, referral list and reviews. He was not the cheapest but I have learned you get what you pay for and I can without reservation say that I was completely satisfied with his professionalism, on-​going communication, his choice of subs and the finished product. I do not hesitate to give Michael at Baum Construction, 5 stars for the terrific job completed on this project.

Sigh. Typical contractor, apparently. Called and spoke to his assistant. She discussed pricing and I told her that we were ready to pay the right price for our bathroom remodel. Mike came out quickly, inspected and even left some material to review about hiring a contractor. Then… here we are over a month later and nothing. I will never understand why people come out to bid and then go silent. Why can’t anyone respond to an email with an ‘I’m sorry, I can’t take your business right now’?

I had a garage Fire last March. It’s a tuff situation when you need to get a contractor on board quick. You wonder is this the correct contractor. Well I found him. Mike was professional, approachable and a pleasure to work with. From March 2012 to June 2012, I worked closely with Mike. It was not an easy process dealing with the city planning department. But Mike was able to get it done. He handled it all the demo, testing, planning, the rebuild and the approvals. I would recommend Baum Construction & Development and I plan on using him again in the future.

I can’t say enough good things about Mike and the work he and his sub-​contractors have done for my wife and I. We are currently in the middle of our third project with Mike, a light remodeling of a bathroom. Prior to this one, we added on a room that we are using as a home office, and remodeled the other bathroom in the house. All jobs have gone smoothly, with very little or no downtime, and Mike is always available if I have questions.
Doing any kind of remodeling is hard especially when you don’t know the steps that are involved. Mike is great about walking us through those steps before we start, as well as outlining the impact (if any) the work will have on us living in the house while the work is being done.
I would highly recommend Mike to anyone, and in fact a neighbor used him on a remodel project after seeing the work he did on our home office.

It’s been over 2 weeks since Michael came out. I gave him a written description of the work I wanted done. He looked at it and said this was not how he usually works, but OK. He told me he would send me a proposal, but I haven’t heard anything from him.
A call or email, even if he was going to pass on this, would be nice.

I would have given him zero stars if I could have. Michael knew our budget from day 1 and we had the money lined up and ready to go. We basically told him how much money we had to work with and what could he do with it. He referred us to an architect he worked with (I would highly recommend that you get your architect separate – they seemed to be working in cahoots) and they messed up a bunch of times and didn’t pay attention to the budget. He took about 3 MONTHS to come up with a bid, and when he finally did it was 40K over. He didn’t have the balls to tell us in person – he emailed it. Baum offered no other solutions (i.e. reduce the number of bedrooms). He almost made us lose the entire project and interest rate we were locked into, but we were able to switch contractors. This guy is scammy and made a big mess out of our project. Baum charged us 3K for plans we never were able to use and posed as the architect to our lender to try to squeeze money out of the bank. He was supposed to get paid out of our loan but ended up threatening to put a lien on our house so we paid him out of pocket just to make him go away. We had a feeling that he was making money by making proposals and getting plans done and adding a fee for himself. I would highly recommend that you stay away from this guy. He was bad at answering emails and phone calls, took forever to get a bid and seemed like he just didn’t know what he was doing. The last thing you need in a contractor is somebody who is unreliable, dishonest, and the most unhelpful person you could ever imagine. This guy is a total unprofessional. STAY AWAY FROM MICHAEL BAUM unless you want a mess on your hands.

I have nothing bad to say about this company. Ive never done construction on our own home and we needed someone to do a job that wouldnt cost us the bank, but still do a good job. Michael is very quick at responding everytime i email or call him and i was pleasantly surprised when his prject manager came by with the electrician to view the job before starting. I didnt get ripped off in price and they did the job quickly and beautifully… viewing all the details to make the space match the rest of our condo.

I just needed some shelving put in where the water heater used to be in a kitchen closet in an old (1950’s) house in Long Beach. My landlord didnt see it as a necessity, so Iwas on my own to schedule and pay for it. I’d gotten Michael Baum’s biz card somewhere through some networking and when i looked at the website, was hesitant to call just to ask for 3 shelves to be installed.
I’m SO GLAD i did end up calling because it worked out perfectly! I am going to be letting my landlord know about him because she always seems to get the worst people to do installations and repairs around here. The people she picks are almost always creepy, smell bad and then leave my house/​yard area a MESS and then i find out within a couple weeks of the job being done that it was NOT in fact done very well.
All in all, he was really friendly, really flexible and didnt treat me differently just because it was a small job. He kinda reminded my of a funny uncle i would have. That is a GREAT resource to have and now I have a reliable go-​to guy for big or small projects. Most importantly, he did a really quality job putting up the shelves, which i am so grateful for!
For any landlords out there, i would highly recommend Baum Construction because he actually cleans up after himself, isn’t creepy and his work will last so it will save you the time and money of having to re-​do projects and/​or having it ruin your property int he long run!