The ideal contractor

 

English: Taylorville, WV, June 22, 2009 — Contractor Dennis Ballew works with a special lift to finalize the location of a housing unit at the Parks Manor community site in Taylorville. Louis Sohn FEMA (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

contractors (Photo credit: Crown Molding)

I had lots of ideas about what qualifications for our contractor that we wanted before we began searching for one. Of course these are evolving ideas and as we experience and learn more than our ideas change.

For us and most people an ideal contractor will be one who shows up on time, does their work in a professional and clean manner and does it on budget? Is this too much to ask for? In many cases people dont have a personal relationship with their contractors so what type of qualification will make you believe they will do all the above?

You can never be sure. Many projects will go sideways for many reasons related to the contractor and not related to the contractor.

I looked for years of incorporation under the same name, proof of insurance (general liability) and proof of workman compensation. Than I looked at references and I called several of them. An interesting contractor mentioned to me that people only give the references of all the jobs they did right but none of the jobs that didnt go well. So when you look at a list of references, is that list complete and are there gaps in the list where no work was referenced? ie if they built house x for Joe in 2013 and y for Smith in 2015 what did they do in 2014? We considered larger companies to be more reliable than smaller companies although I’m not sure this is true. Larger companies also have the ability to fight any contract disputes and take control of the job away from you. 

All work should be warantied. Registration in a home warranty program is another way of insuring the contractor is legitimate. The waranties of individual companies is probably only worth as much as how long they take to declare bankruptcy and are probably hard to enforce if they dont. Even government or industry regulated home warranty programs are no guarantee of good performance and there are many stories on the internet that when the house is built and a warranty issue comes up, the warranty program does the minimal amount of work necessary to satisfy the warranty.

What guarantee would I like to see? I would like to see when you give a contractor a deposit, that contractor than gives you a letter of credit or performance bond for the same amount of money that says if the contract is not satisfied under condition x,y and z than you get that money back. It’s putting money where your mouth is. If a contractor says he can build the house on budget, on time and with good quality than he should put his money on it and provide a letter of credit or performance bond to prove that! There are letters of credit or performance bonds used all over the world. They cost maybe 1% of the value of the bond/ credit. If your deposit is 20,000$ than the bond you receive should be worth 20,000$ and it will add 200$ to the cost of the project that the homeowner should pay. Would you pay 200$ for that type of guarantee? Sure. Would the contractor set aside 20,000$ to satisfy the credit? If they believe in their work than I think they should. Did I ever find a contractor who offered this form of guarantee? In my area, I’ve only seen one group of small contractors offer a bond for work and I never found anyone else. With a bond or credit of a substantial amount of money, you can almost be certain the contractor will satisfy the conditions and complete your work.

Of course it’s always nice to be able to communicate with your contractor and he/ she should be able to listen to your requests but at the end of the day I think a good contractor boils down to one who shows up on time, does their work well and does it on budget.

 

general contractors in richmond virginia (Photo credit: Crown Molding)

 

arborist report

Parks and Forestry- Arborists

I thought this process was straight forward when I started. Get the arborist report, submit and get the clearance. Little did I know that a process that was supposed to take 2 weeks ended up taking nearly 3 months.

Finding an arborist to provide the report for construction permits was simple. I was surprised to find out that some arborists refused to work with the city. In hindsight, I can understand. The arborist report was done in 2 weeks and he cost 450$.

The report described the tree protection around the trees and the risk of injury to any of the trees during the construction. In our report, there was minimal risk to injury if we followed the rules described in the report. I only included a final copy of the arborist report for everyone to see what it looks like. There were many revisions before the end.

The city arborist replied that he would like larger tree protection around the various trees and he had some concerns with the wording in the document. We had to get the arborist report revised. Unfortunately, the arborist than went on vacation for 3 weeks.

Even after he returned from vacation with the revised report, he again had problems with the wording and wanted another revision. In addition, he wanted the tree fencing erected before the letter of clearance was given.

There was a lot of discussion between the builder, my arborist, city arborist and myself about what was necessary to get the letter of clearance and in the end I find that it was  a big waste of time and money. The builder and my arborist wanted to get away with the minimal amount of work necessary to get the clearance and the arborist wanted everything done write down to the letter.

The city arborist won of course and we ended up erecting a large fence around all the trees in the front and the back.

Where we done?

Of course not, the process still required a notice of tree injury on the fence and a 3 week period where the public was given time to object to the tree injury. I found this whole process cumbersome as well because the concern did not come from any risk of tree injury to either the tree or any part within the tree protection zone but to a small portion of roots that may have extended beyond the the tree protection zone under the existing front porch. Our construction did not require building something in that area but it did require removing the porch during the construction. For this reason we had to apply for the permit, pay 300$ and wait the additional 3 weeks.

This was getting well into 3 months now.

The tree deposit for the tree on the city owned land was 2500$ in addition to all of the other time and costs.

About Us

That’s not us- but you get the idea!

We’re average.

We have 3 kids, two girls and a boy.

We are relatively young still having owned a house through our 30’s and started building our house as we approached 40’s.

We hope this house will be the last house we live in for the rest of our lives.

We don’t work in construction, design, architecture, CAD et et. We’re just learning this ourselves and sharing it with whoever is interested!

All the stuff here is the property of the managers of this post. Don’t copy this to other places on the web. You may link to here.

I apologize for not posting so often! It will get better as the house starts (and we have more time!)

If you are one of our builder/ contractors and would like to publicly disclose your name on this blog than feel free to ask! I have done my best to insure the privacy of everyone involved in this project- including ourselves!

Please post your comments! I want a healthy discussion. We have family, friends, builders, architects, designers, bankers et et all looking at our blog with their own perspective.

That’s it! Please post!

Still getting our house ready- Asbestos story

One of the items we had to do to prepare our house for demolition was to remove all the hazardous substances and get a certificate. I say this now but the reality is, in our jurisdiction, the governing laws for hazardous substance removal seem to apply to work place occupational hazards more than residential home construction. So in truth, was this step absolutely necessary? Maybe not but my contractor made a good point when he said if the neighbours know about the hazardous substance and you destroy the home without the removal they could complain.

We knew when we bought the home, that there were some hazardous substances. They included vermiculite (tested at 0.5% actinolite which is the minimum amount that needs to be removed with precaution) insulation and a oil tank in the house.

We hired a company to do the removal. Here is the group of guys working away at it. You can see that rather than climb into the attic to bag all the vermiculite, they cut the ceiling drywall in the house and let it fall allowing them to sweep it up from the floor into bags. They did this room by room, taping and ceiling the entire room before beginning removal. Also the guys in the room doing the cutting and bagging wore HAZMAT suits. The whole house was done in 5 days. Here are the pictures.

 

The oil tank was in the basement and also emptied and removed during the process. There is a big difference between removing a backyard in ground oil tank (about 3000$+) and one just sitting in the basement (about 400-500$).  The cost of removing the backyard in ground oil tank soars if there is any evidence of leak and soil contamination! Than you start hauling truck loads of dirt out of your backyard as environmental waste (10,000$+). Make sure you know all these things before you buy the house!

In our house there is also a septic tank that was left over from when they switched over to sewage. I understand this is not considered hazardous waste and can be removed during the demolition.

In the end, we received a letter of clearance from the company and kept this. The city wasn’t even interested in knowing about the hazardous substances and suggested that since it was removed before the demolition permit was applied for that we just check the box on the form that says there are no hazardous substances present. I guess this is true now and it is much simpler to not get the city involved.