I’m getting ready to do a house addition/remodel and while it’s not a mansion or anything, it’s easily the second most expensive thing I’ve ever done. FWIW, we are adding an additional room on both the first and second floors, we are not living in the house, it has modern electrical and plumbing, and has been added on to at least once in the past 80 years. Some guidance would be greatly appreciated.
-None of the 6 guys who have submitted bids will give a firm date for completion, only some boilerplate about making every effort to complete work within X months. It appears that that’s the way things are done around here. I understand that delays can happen for any number of reasons. But the way these contracts read, it seems like they are within their rights to tear off a big piece of my house, then walk off indefinitely without penalty.
-Am I right to assume that references are completely worthless? Only satisfied customers would be willing to be used as references, so it’s not a real cross-section, right?
-How likely and how large are typical cost/time over-runs. The contracts are very specific about what work is to be done and what materials are to be used, and we don’t intend to change our minds halfway through.
-How much money up front is typical? I’m not thrilled about the idea of paying for nothing, but I understand that they don’t want to work for nothing either.
References mean that at least one person likes the guy. If you have neighbors who have had work done, check with them, and check for community bulletin boards and the like. We don’t have a general contractor, but we just got a general handyman to do painting, tiling and general fixup work. We got his name from a neighbor who used him, and it turned out great. Ditto for our flooring contractor.
Find out who licenses contractors in your state. They’ll have a list of complaints against contractors and how they were resolved. Also make sure the license is up to date. Also check into what laws exist about payments - in Massachusetts a contractor cannot ask for more than 33% before works begins.
Make sure the contractor has liability insurance that protects you if someone is injured while working on your house. Also, depending where you live, be aware that there are possible issues with a contractor not paying the subcontractors - see here - if a contractor doesn’t pay his subs, the subs can put a lien on your house even if you paid the contractor in full. There are ways to protect yourself from this.
Go ahead and check the references. We were amazed one time to find that the list of references a contractor gave out included people who weren’t happy with his work.
If a contractor offers a discount if you pull the building permit yourself, or if you go without a permit, walk away. Permits protect you from lousy contractors.
It’s likely that while they can give info like complaints, they’re barred from actually recommending a specific contractor. Leaves them open to some liability. Worth a try though.
I’m sure you’re right, but folks around here love to gossip. Go outside and catch the inspectors on smoke break and they’ll tell you all kinds of stuff off the record.
Check with the Better Business Bureau, but understand that doing so will probably only be useful for identifying bad contractors, not good ones. Meaning that, while it’s likely that a contractor with a bunch of complaints is probably not a safe bet, the converse isn’t necessarily true- a contractor with no complaints could easily be bad, too. You can search SDMB for a couple of fairly recent threads about various posters’ experiences with the BBB. They’re mostly negative.
If you’re willing to consider a single third-hand anecdote, I can tell you that a longtime friend of mine has done many renovations and additions on an old house, and he said he found that there was virtually no relationship between price charged and contractor quality. Some cheap ones were good, some were bad. Some expensive ones were good, some were bad.
Indirectly related to up-front/installment payments: If the contractor is willing and your schedule allows, see if you can buy the materials directly, even if it means accompanying the contractor to a wholesaler and paying yourself when you’re there. You can still agree to pay the contractor his markup on the materials, if it concerns him- what you’re trying to avoid is a situation where a contractor is using your money to buy materials for another job he’s already working on, intending to buy materials for your project with money from his next job, the materials for which he will buy with money from the job after that, etc. In this scenario, if he has a slowdown, he’ll have already spent your money without buying your materials, so he’ll stall on your project until more money comes in. Or, maybe there’s a way to prevent this in the terms of your contract with him- I dunno.
It probably goes without saying, but hold onto that last 10% or whatever you agree to until EVERYTHING is COMPLETELY finished and approved. The contractor who did our exterior renovation hit my wife with some sob story about how he wanted to be sure to pay his crew, so since they were done, could he please have the check for the last 10% now, please? Which might have been fine… except that the windows they installed didn’t pass the City’s inspection the next week. Strangely, we didn’t get the sense that the contractor was really, really interested in fixing the problem now that he had all the money from us he was going to get. The issue dragged on for months.
Oh yes, a thousand times this. You really want the contractor to be into you for money at the end, so he finishes everything to your satisfaction. When we had our bathroom redone, there was a towel cabinet that was on backorder. The contractor tried to bully my wife into making the final payment, but he’d “let” her hold back $100 to guarantee they installed the cabinet when it came in. Luckily bullying my wife is pretty much impossible, so she declined. Amazingly, the day the cabinet was delivered to our house the contractor showed up to install it and get his last 10%.
Pay the money to get a subscription to Angie’s List. www.angieslist.com Even if you don’t continue to use AL after the year is up, it will be worth it to read anything that has been said about your bidders. Angie’s List is not a list of people that are willing to say something nice about a contractor, it is a list of people who have used your contractor.
Angie’s List is the same as asking your neighbors, except in a wider area (the entire area the contractors service) and with more specific info.
Also, with regards to references- Mike Holmes of “Holmes on Homes” says you should go visit the references and see the work first-hand. And talk to all of the references you can.
Regarding the not wanting to commit to a firm completion date - I would recommend gettting ‘liquidated damages’ in your contract. What that means is that if the project is not done by a specific date, the contractor has to pay x number of dollars per day to you. If a contractor has several jobs going on at once and one of them has liquidated damages, which one do you think is going to get priority?
If you want the project done in two months and the contractor says it will take four, you won’t get anyone to agree to damages after 2 months. It isn’t a way to get the job completed faster, just to insure it won’t go beyond a certain date.
You say you won’t change your mind halfway through. That’s rarely the case. There are almost always changes made during a remodel. Be aware that having liquidated damages adds an extra layer of negotiation to each change. Does it extend the completion date? If so, by how much?
I think it’s still worth having the damages. You will get priority over someon who doesn’t have them.
Not to mention the problems one would have trying to sell a house with unpermitted changes. I figure if a contractor suggests doing something without a permit, it is only because he thinks his work won’t pass. Or that he actually isn’t licensed.
