Business ProfileforJames Barton Design-Build, Inc

We invited James out to look at our house and give us an idea of what it might cost to do what we wanted. He took a look at it and thought it would be in the ball park of *****K. We stupidly took him at his word and paid to have some design done and get some quotes put together. During the design process we took several of his design teams suggestions and asked each time "what will this cost". The response was always we won't know until we quote it. That should have been an immediate red flag for us. We ultimately changed about 5 items from our original plan.When the quote came back he sent us the numbers 2 hours before our meeting and they were at 193K, over double our original budget. James could not provide an itemized list of what each item cost and we asked for an explanation on how this got so out of hand. His response was, well you changed scope on us. Keep in mind we changed 5 items, several of which were THEIR suggestions. Five total changes should not equate to a bid 110K over our original number. We asked him to go back and bid it at the original scope, without any of our changes. He said he would get those back to us in about 4 business days. 4 business days came and went and no response from James. We had to reach out to him again to ask where they were at.When the numbers came back the quote was 143K, almost 75% more than our original budget. At this point we were not happy and asked how his original estimate could be so off and to see an itemized list. Again he could not provide that list and then went on to blame us for not reading his design contract that stated any numbers before this were a "guess". Keep in mind that James did not walk us through the design contract, just sent it over for us to sign.James' business model is to get you based on a low bid, then come back with much higher bids and blame it on the industry or some other unknown factor that he can't produce, hoping you will double or triple your budget to his benefit.