The first thing that sets Bigbee Construction apart, Taylor Bigbee says, “sounds silly.” It is this: “we answer the phone and we get back to people.”
She runs the Marion company with her husband, Jordan, and four full-time employees. According to the company’s website, they remodel kitchens and bathrooms, rebuild decks, replace roofs and pour concrete across Cedar Rapids, Marion and Iowa City, and out to smaller towns such as Solon and Tipton. The company has also worked under two names.
The business dates to April 2022, according to its Better Business Bureau profile, and began as Big & Steinke Construction. “It started with two friends who have been in the trade since before they even turned 18 and wanted to try their own hand in it,” Taylor says.
In time, the partners wanted different things. “He kind of wanted to stay truck and trailer,” she says, “and my husband and I wanted to do bigger and keep expanding.” The Bigbees bought out their partner and renamed the company Bigbee Construction. Now the two of them are its only owners.
They split the work along the lines of their backgrounds. According to the company’s website, Jordan has more than 18 years in construction, eight of them in concrete, along with experience in tree trimming, heavy equipment, landscaping and framing, and a background in CAD. Taylor has more than 15 years in the service industry. She handles the communication and the client side, which brings the business back to the phone.
Her claim is modest, and customers back it up. Reviews under both names keep coming back to estimates delivered when promised and calls that got returned. One customer wrote in a Google review that the couple turned a 100-year-old detached garage in Iowa City into an accessory dwelling unit, and that Taylor helped narrow the options when the decisions piled up. Another described a structural job that meant redoing basement footings, replacing a load-bearing beam more than 30 feet long and leveling two floors.
Residential remodeling is, in Taylor’s words, the “bread and butter.” Given the choice, she would lean another way. “If I had to pick, I would love commercial or new builds,” she says. The website lists commercial renovation among the company’s services and says it pulls permits when a project requires them. The company’s Facebook posts have followed a Cedar Rapids four-plex as it was renovated one unit after another.
On larger jobs, the website says, the company sends customers daily updates. The posted hours are Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Keeping the work in-house is the second thing Taylor names. On a kitchen remodel in Hiawatha, the crew took out the wall between the kitchen and the dining room, put the drywall back up and had new electrical run. Replying afterward to that customer’s review, the owners wrote that they had since hired a couple of drywallers of their own, people who know the company’s rule about leaving a job better than they found it.
She puts the approach plainly. “We try to provide all in-house services. So if we can’t do it, we’ve got someone who’s licensed and bonded that can help. But we typically try to do everything here.”