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• Reputation: 14 Q&A: 0 0 0 14 0 0 Classifieds: 0 0 what's this? Expert: 1 topic Living Inside Follow Following 0 Zoltan Farkas

  4 0 Tish I urge you to structure your agreement with your contractor so that the work to be done, and the cost for that work are clearly explicated. You should also have a mechanism detailed in the agreement for handling changes to the agreement as the job progresses. This allows you to add to the scope of the job for an agreed upon price and gives the contractor a way to get compensated for work that is necessary but not anticipated at the outset. This often occurs during remodels when it is impossible to know what you will find when the walls are opened up. I once worked on an old house on Capital Hill that had a sagging ceiling. When the plaster was removed, we saw the joists had been cut through and "repaired" with only a few nails. The entire ceiling had to be reframed and my customer was mystified at the reason for the additional cost. I would have had to be clairvoyant to see the extent of the work necessary to make the repair at the outset. Get references, work with a legitimate contractor, and have an agreement you are both comfortable with. Zoltan Farkas answered in Living Inside about 1 year ago | Report Comment on this answer Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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  3 0 Be firm / confident, & plan ahead. Your contractor should use contracts. They should also have bid the job at a certain price, and the language in that bid should spell out qualifiers, like "if you build this in the next 3 weeks, these prices will be good'. If not, present them with several contracts of your own: break the job into stages, and pre-determine how much budget buffer (and time buffer) each stage has to 'go over', and make it clear IN THE CONTRACT, NOT VERBALLY that overages beyond that will come from the contractor's pocket. Just remember that there's Cheap, Fast and Good and you get to pick only 2. Rev.Enant answered in Living Inside about 1 year ago | Report Comment on this answer Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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  0 0 Join the Homeowner's club (http://www.homeownersclub.org/ ) and use them to hire contractors. They will arrange for service people for small jobs, and arrange bids for larger jobs. You don't pay the contractors directly, all payments go through the organization, and they keep things honest and straightforward. I've had pretty good luck, both in terms of price and experience, with work done by people associated with Homeowner's Club. Tom Sackett answered in Living Inside about 1 year ago | Report Comment on this answer Enter your comment or ask a new question New comments are not being accepted at this time.

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