Inexperienced and unprofessional

Through the recommendation of our contractor, we hired Helmina to help us with design and landscape work, however, she ended up putting herself in the role of doing builds even though she knew we had our contractor lined up. Further to that, the contractor wouldn't provide estimates on the items she has quoted which gave her a monopoly on the pricing on the project. We were placed in a very awkward situation as it almost appeared as if the designer and contractor had been colluding.

Further to that, working with Helmina has been the epitome of hidden surcharges. She overthinks everything and pays attention to detail that doesn't matter or add value. She went out of her way to ask questions with the contractor, however, she subsequently surprised us with an additional bill without any previous communication that she was going to charge us for each and every phone call, email and text message she sends to either us or the contractor. She did the same for asking questions to the City of Berkeley. Considering she's based in Berkeley, which I thought was the benefit to hiring someone local, she should be more familiar with city policy and even if she didn't, we shouldn't be charged for her to learn on the job. It was quite incredible to see that Helmina was not willing to accept there's a cost to doing business.

The time for her to complete phase one, which is to design the overall schematic, was done in a rather timely fashion. However, when it came time for phase two, it took her 5 months to complete the finishing details and drawings we needed for the build. Aside from being frustrated over how long it took to complete phase 2, I received the final deliverable and invoice on a Friday. I acknowledged receipt of the completed work and asked a question about the invoice the day after. On the following Monday, she then harassed me for payment and wrote this ridiculously long email explaining how much unpaid time she spent in providing us with proposals (not even the designs themselves!), a matter which completely came out of the blue considering it was less than a business day since I had been invoiced.

Apparently Helmina spent all her unpaid time pulling together proposals and overthinking things so when it came time to actually reviewing her work, we were already working at a time deficit. At almost every stage in working with her, she kept badgering us on how we've technically run out of hours before we were even able to provide feedback for the first round of reviews.

If you're willing to be patient in working with someone who likes to overthink the details and be told what your design should be without you providing much input, perhaps Helmina can do the job for you, but be careful of all the hidden charges she'll likely spring on you. Make sure to have pricing sorted out upfront!