I recently hired two different contractors for two different jobs that I needed done at my Holly Springs home. One job was a large outside job, the other was a small inside job. I can do a lot on my own, but one of these jobs was too much for me, and the other was priced so well, I decided to leave it to a professional.
I’m not new at working with contractors. I’ve even done contract work in the past. My latest experience was so frustrating, that it opened my eyes to a wider phenomenon that we’re experiencing as residents in a town like Holly Springs. Holly Springs is such a booming area, that there is more work to be done than contractors that can do it.
If you’ve tried to get work done on your home, you may have experienced any number of frustrations. One of the most frustrating things that can happen, is the non-return call. You may call for a service because you’re in need of immediate help. Home emergencies are stressful; a broken pipe, a broken A/C unit, an exploding hot water heater. The list goes on and on.
When you’re in an emergency situation, it seems you can’t get someone there fast enough. There are a few companies in town that will call you right back, there are others that may leave you hanging.
Once you’re able to secure someone for your work, before the service people get there, take pictures of the problem. There are at least three benefits to taking photos.
You may end up filing an insurance claim, and it doesn’t hurt to have some photos of the incident.
If there is any damage done to the surrounding areas when they are working, you have photographic proof that it was not there before they started the work. This one is an important one, and I will discuss this in more detail later in the article.
Sometimes it’s not obvious what part was replaced, or if there was even something replaced. Having the “before” photos can give you something to cross-reference if you’re in doubt, and worried that you may have been scammed.
The next step that you should take is to make sure that the contractor that you’re hiring is licensed in the specialty that you are asking for the work to be done. Here are just a few of the websites to check to see if the company or person you’re hiring is licensed.
General Contractor: nclbgc.org
Plumbing, Heating: public.nclicensing.org/Public/Search
Electrical Contractors: arls-public.ncbeec.org/Public/Search
Learning the Lingo:
You’ll often hear three terms together: licensed, insured and bonded. What do these terms mean?
Licensing| Depending on what type of business you’re hiring, a license to operate may be required. A license signifies that they have the necessary training and meet the requirements needed to complete the job you are attempting to hire someone to perform.
Insurance| When a company is insured, it means that the business has protection in case there is an accident or if an employee is injured in the course of performing his or her job. There are several types of business insurance that protect the business from a variety of risks, but keep in mind that not every business needs all types of insurance. In many cases, the insurance is there to protect the company, not the customer.
Bonding| This last term is perhaps the least understood of the three, but it is equally important to being licensed and insured. Let’s take a deeper look at what it means to be bonded.
What Is Bonding?
While business insurance is protection for the company, being bonded means that a company has purchased protection for the customer. If something goes wrong, the customer can file a claim against the company and the bond purchased by the company will cover the cost of the claim, provided it is a valid claim. In its simplest terms, bonds are meant to protect consumers from harmful, unethical or otherwise poor business practices. If a contractor is “bonded,” it means that you are financially protected if the contractor doesn’t complete a job for you, or the job is poorly executed. Keep in mind that the bond isn’t the only way to to assure a completed job. Of course, never make complete payment until the job is complete. Some contractors will ask for a downpayment in order to cover material cost, but you should never pay the full amount for a job before the job is complete. Many contractors, like plumbers, electricians or HVAC companies, aren’t bonded or carry bond insurance. General Contractors are more likely to be bonded, as they perform much larger jobs. No matter who you call, just know how or if you’re covered if there’s a problem.
Now that we’ve gotten the basics out of the way, I’d like to tell you what happened to us. After selecting a well-known contractor to do our big job, I was given a timeline and a quote. The problem is that they were both more vague than I knew.
When you have a job bid on, get a specific timeline with consequences if the timeline is not met. That’s how it’s done in the commercial world. If you introduce this policy at the beginning, you’re more likely to get a realistic timeline. If the contractor is giving you a timeline just to get the job, it may not be a realistic one, or it may be a best-case-scenario timeline. You need to know the worst case.
The quote I received seemed to be complete. In the quote was what we discussed would be done. I never thought to get more specific. There can be no assumptions, and EVERYTHING that you talked about must be in the quote. If not, there is room for subjective interpretation. Let me give you a different example. “I would like to take you to dinner at a nice restaurant.” What might be implied here is that we are going to a nice restaurant, and I’m planning to pay for your dinner. You may be envisioning going to have a nice steak dinner at Ruth Chris and not having to pay any part of the bill. What I’m thinking could be that I’m going to drive you to a buffet, and we’re going to split the bill. I know a buffet where the food isn’t that good, but the owners are nice. Since I’m driving, that means that I’m taking you.
I may not be intentionally trying to deceive you, it’s just that we were both making different assumptions.
In the case of the job we had done at the house, there were a lot of things that we discussed, but were not in the paperwork, and that caused issues on the job. No matter what the job is, get every detail put on paper before you agree to hire them. What are the materials going to be? How will they be installed? What will the finishes be? What will it look like when the job is finished? I would try to include everything you can think of. We had problems with everything from how certain materials were installed (it didn’t match what we had before, and looked much worse), to the wrong trim being used. Even now, after the job is done, there is a basic design flaw causing issues every time it rains. The contractor’s feeling on it? “Too bad.” We have had to go behind the contractor to finish trim issues because it wasn’t clear on the quote. When we asked for him to do the work, we got another estimate, although it should have been included in the original one.
My final suggestion on the job goes back to what I said earlier, and that’s TAKE “BEFORE” PICTURES. In both the jobs that I recently had done, there was damage done to the house that wasn’t in their scope of work, but in the area where the work was done. Both contractors questioned if I was sure that they had done the damage, and both claimed that the damage was already there. I will tell you that the damage was eventually fixed in both places, but having the photos would have made it a quick process rather than a confrontation. The photos will also help if the job includes anything that needs to be put back the way it was before.
Part of the problem that we have in Holly Springs is that there is a lot of service work available to the contractors, so customer service may not be as good as if there was very little work available. The abundance of work makes your job less valuable to some of them.
I want to be clear. We have a lot of companies in the area that do great work. The two different companies that I hired both have the ability to do great work. I made a mistake by not getting specific with the quotes, setting a specific timeline and getting before pictures. Had I taken those three steps, my jobs would have gone much better, and I believe I would have had no issues.
