You’re absolutely right. I pulled it completely out of my ass. I never thought that some daring soul would challenge the observation that some contractors suck and some are good, or that this state of affairs might have be true in the past. Since you would like a cite and I don’t feel like searching for such a self-evident piece of information, I will submit testimonial in this very thread as evidence that some contractors, past and present, have indeed sucked. As evidence that some contractors are good, I will submit my own testimony that my mother last year had her kitchen redone perfectly by a caring and intelligent contractor, and about 20 years ago we had the floors re-done by a team which was perfectly competent. Although, in the interests of perfect honesty, I will admit that the flooring group was working for free in return for some favors that my mother had done them, which might disqualify them, but they were professional contractors. Is that sufficient evidence for my statement?
Well, gee, it’s a little hard to compare when the state of the art has changed so much. I would guess that most doctors (then and now) were moderately well-versed in the state of medicine at the time and were genuinely trying to help their patients to the best of their ability. There were (and are) a few total charlatans and snake-oil salesmen, too. The institution of stringent licensing backed by rigorous examinations has probably cut down on the numbers of quack doctors. Licensing had probably eliminated some completely incompentent contractors, as well, although contracting licences are not as hard to get as medical ones. So, yeah, maybe the overall percentages in contractor quality have changed some. Which still doesn’t invalidate my perfectly non-quantitative (and somewhat facetious) statement.
Why do you have your knickers in such a twist over this anyways?
I work with and for contractors. To a man, they are particular in the extreme that the job be done correctly, and take great pride in their work. It is a demanding profession, and one that few people outside of it appreciate. Ignorant bullshit statements like Jeep’s raise my hackles.
Some sucked back then, and some suck now? That says fuck-all about anything. How many is some? Is it the same as it was before? Do you even have a clue?
The fact that in the past an unspecified number of contractors were incompetent is absolutely irrelevant to and unsupportive of such a blanket condemnation as “Modern contractors are not much better,” especially when it is supported by exactly one data point.
Any profession has its bad apples, but they do not define the group.
They simply have to be. The knowledge required of a modern contractor is many times that of those 100 years ago. Materials, techniques, tools, etc. are much advanced. Codes are increasingly complex and restrictive. There is simply no comparison.
There are no more “bad” contractors than there are “bad” people in general. I had a dentist totally screw up a root canal. By the logic in this thread, that means modern dentists are no better than the ones 100 years ago. It’s a silly argument.
So, we agree. I made an extremely general statement and you felt compelled to challenge it.
I’m glad the guys you work for are good. Some aren’t. Purely anecdotal evidence suggests this number is “many”. Why not let people rant about the bad ones without “raising your hackles”? if you feel like defending the profession as a whole, work on the licencing requirements, or (if that’s too much work) return-rant about idiot customers!
How many? What evidence? Have you heard from the contractors in these anecdotes, or only the clients? Do you make a habit of only considering one side of a story?
The rant was about contractors in general, not the bad ones. If you want to make the point that bad contractors are bad contractors, have at it. In the absence of any particular data, it is about all you are left with.
I’ve got you both beat. A few months ago, I was visiting a job site where a contractor was excavating a trench in a road to install a sewer line, and right in front of me an almost perfectly preserved page of the New York Sun from September 15, 1941 came out of the ground. It had a Hitler cartoon on one side.
I took some high resolution photos and photocopied it in case it disintegrated after coming out of the ground, but it’s still in one piece down in my basement.
We have this situation too - though our house is newer. The contractor who built the house lived in it himself for awhile before selling it to the guy we bought it from. The house is only 12 years old, but we are already replacing windows because the frames on some of them are rotting due to bad sealing.
That’s the only really bad thing though (at least that we know about right now). The other things are just … odd. Like the fact that are are phones in all the bathrooms. There is at least one phone jack in every room of the house - and sometimes two or three. And the bathrooms are carpeted (this is changing as soon as we save some $ to change it). And last summer when we repainted the house, we took the shutters off and found one of them had been nailed up over the button for the door bell by the front door. We always wondered by the side door had a button but the front door did not. Mystery solved …
I recently sold my house, which had been built in 1906. I wonder how many of its faults the new owners will blame on me. As OtakuLoki phrased it, my house had lots of projects done by people ambitious beyond their skill (it doesn’t help that it was a HUD property in the '70s).
There are plenty of oddities to choose from, but my favorite was the door knob screwed onto the frame of the window at the top of the stairs. Just the knob, mind you. It doesn’t open anything, so it’s not even a door to nowhere. It’s a door knob to nowhere.
My place is really weird. It can best be described as an asymmetrical duplex. The guy downstairs has the smaller portion, with a front room, kitchenette, one bedroom, and a bathroom. That part is relatively normal, except that the furnace access is in his portion yet the only thermostat is in my front room. I have a short flight of steps to my front door, then a not-quite-full flight inside to the two bedrooms. The kitchen is big enough to have useless space in the middle - you can stand there and have a nice chat, but you can’t install an island or anything. There are also washer/dryer hookups, but the drain is very much not up to code. When I replaced the old stacked unit I had to go to a plumbing supply and get some special doohickeys.
The closets are strange too. Downstairs, the coat closet is too shallow, which means whenever the door is opened or closed it rubs against the coats and forces them to hang at an angle. Upstairs, there’s a small closet in the bedroom that has a weird passage or something running off to the side, completely useless. In the other bedroom/study, there’s a closet that we sometimes call the “redheaded stepchild room” or the “pot growing room”. It has a few steps up, its own closet inside, and a window. It’s too short to stand up in (I’m 5’11"), and I had to tape foil over the window to keep stuff from getting sun damaged.
And if that wasn’t bizarre enough, the wiring is all kinds of fucked up. Power and phone outlets are few, and generally in totally stupid places. We have a lot of electronics, and power spikes are common, so surge suppressors are a must. The circuit breaker is outside, and the circuits themselves are laid out in a way that makes no sense. Rather than one circuit per room, or perhaps one circuit per two rooms, it’s more like one circuit that runs through half of two or more rooms, which are not necessarily adjacent. I labeled the breaker, at least.
Christ, Contra, WTF is it with you and derailing threads with lame semantic arguments? Contractors, doctors, dentists, it doesn’t matter. There is a bell curve of abilities amongst all professions. Then, as now, there are a few who suck either because of malice or incompetence. The relative percentage is more or less the same. Everyone seems to understand that saying that isn’t a slight against all of the nation’s contractors except for you. Yeah, in the past they didn’t have strict licensing but they had guilds who did a good job of keeping the profession pure.
Personally, all of the contractors I have had do work on my home have been very good to excellent. The one time I was idiotic enough to hire a non-licensed contractor to do work on my house, I seriously regretted it. I spent two years as a construction engineer and worked with hundreds of contractors. Maybe two of them were shitty.
Anyway, the guy who owned my house before me was a do-it-yourselfer. The weird thing is that he would spend the money on very good quality things and then cheap out on the installation. The best was the dishwasher. Instead of using flexible plumbing hose for the water drainage, he used electrical conduit tubing. When the Sears guy replaced my washer he laughed his ass off and took a picture. He said that in many years of installs, he had never seen that before.
When I was a construction engineer, we’d find all kinds of stuff. We were remodeling a huge space one time. It was a main branch office of a bank and we were turning it into a server farm. When they took out the teller counters, they found hundreds of dollars worth of change. They removed the door from the vault to use it as a room. The vault was built first and the building built around it. There was no way to get it out so they leaned it up against a wall and built a new wall in front of it.
I don’t know what you are talking about. Can you point me towards an example or three?
I quite agree. That is nowhere near the statement I took issue with. In fact, it is nearly the polar opposite.
I have made no comment about licensing one way or another. Perhaps your quibble is with someone else?
And yet, you support a statement like “Modern contractors are no better”? You support a statement like " some contractors suck and some don’t"? As if one half of one percent is equivalent to ninety-nine and one half percent for purposes of comparison?
I made it quite clear that I support the idea that bad contractors are bad contractors, and that the occurrence of same reflects the general population. Perhaps you could be bothered to read my posts a bit more carefully?
Will you agree with me, too? Or explain to me how it differs from the statements you object to? Is the qualifier “few” the part that is important to you?
I assure you, if I said “some people are assholes”, you should not take that to mean that I dislike the majority of people. Given that the Straight Dope, and other sources, abound with stories of people who are undoubtedly assholes, I would venture that the number of assholes in the world is “many”. I would apply roughly the same rule to contractors.
I’m sorry about that. When I was a baby I ate anything, including pieces of plaster. Pop wasn’t into renovation, and was quite frugal, but he did spring for panelling for my room, my brother’s room, and our toyroom, which covered up the holes. Did you enjoy the various incarnations of “oops” paint and the burnt orange carpet remnant too?
Who pissed in your Cheerios? You come into a thread full of people complaining about their contractor/housing experiences, and pick on my little post? Get a fucking life.
I don’t mean to pry, but what Mile Road are you near? I can’t picture any part of Farmington that would be so old, except maybe the bit over off Grand River near beautiful downtown.
