8 Choosing a contractor
March 2024
Some Laminated Veneer Lumber (LVL) used in our renovation
I recommend that anyone who plans to hire a contractor should first read Tracy Kidder’s excellent 1999 book, House. It had a huge effect on my thinking as we started searching for a general contractor for our renovation.
In House, Judith, one of the homeowners, does a good job of communicating what’s at stake in choosing a contractor:
“You turn everything over to a gang of people who don’t really know you or have any reason to care about you. You turn over dreams, pride, and money. It’s a frightening gamble.”
In my opinion, House describes a homeowner-contractor relationship that didn’t actually work. The homeowners negotiated with a contractor named Apple Corps, and Apple Corps gave them a fixed price for the work. That was fine. What wasn’t fine was that after Apple Corps quoted a fixed price of $146,660 (this was back in the 1980s when you could build a house for that; nowadays you’d have to add another zero to that figure), the homeowners asked for “a deal” — they demanded that the price be $660 lower. When asked why, the homeowner simply says, “I want the six hundred dollars.”
That $660 “deal” cost the homeowners far more than they knew. It poisoned what should have been a partnership and turned it into an adversarial relationship. Every single decision made by the builders from that point on was colored by the demand that the owners pay less for the same work. It was penny-wise and pound-foolish.
True Confessions: I’m clueless about construction
I try to be honest about what things are in my skill set and which ones aren’t. While I’m a pretty accomplished hardware/software developer and a decent electrical engineer, my experiences in construction are lacking.
To illustrate this point, my biggest success in construction is that I installed our mailbox and mailbox post in a footing made with quick-set cement. That mailbox post is still there today.
On the other hand, I once tried to fix a leaking toilet by replacing the toilet seal in our old house. It took most of a 2 week vacation to get it not to leak, and we still had to hire a plumber to come fix it when I was done. It was not my finest moment.
That said, I’m pretty familiar with project management. Earlier in my career, I managed several multi-million dollar wide-area network deployments and was principal investigator on a couple of big ARPA projects. I’ve written my share of project plans and budgets and been responsible for delivering results on time and within those budgets. So while I may not know how to wield a power saw (pro tip: stay away from the spinning part), I can read PERT and GANT charts and figure out what’s on the critical path to project completion.
Our architect recommended three contractors to start with
While we had some experience with local contractors for some minor bathroom renovations in the past, we weren’t confident we necessarily knew the best ones. So when we asked Anne for suggestions, we recommended 3 contractors with very different approaches for us to interview. We hope that by talking with them, we’ll get a better picture of what our project is likely to cost and what the risks are.
I’ve emailed Anne’s project plans and parts lists to all three of the folks that Anne recommended, and we’re scheduling house walk throughs with each of them for the second week of March. After that, we’ll wait for quotes and then decide if we are comfortable with any of these companies or if we need to interview more contractors.
Just as a sanity check, I’ve done a back-of-the-envelope estimate of what the project will cost based on Anne’s parts list and some wild guesses of what the components of the renovation will quote us.1
1 To be fair, I do have some figures to back up my guesses. According to HGTV, the average kitchen remodel cost between $75,000 and $150,000 in 2023. A primary suite bathroom remodel is between $25,000 and $75,000. So at least one reason this estimate is so high is just that we’re remodeling the kitchen and three bathrooms in addition to installing the elevator.
Estimated project cost based on putting my finger in the air
Without even having any quotes for the pieces, my estimate comes in around $500,000. And I suspect that’s going to be on the low end of what the actual quotes are.