As mentioned earlier, we had some reliability trouble with the first renovation contractor we started working with (he promised answers to questions by certain dates and then never delivered on time, which made me worried about how he would be with real work).  It took over several weeks for me to find him and I wasn’t happy about having to start again from scratch. 

Up to that point I had been using the Google, the Yellow Pages and the BBB site to find renovation contractors.  But in my desperation to fill this gap quickly, I turned to Craigslist. 

Why on earth didn’t I just start there?!?!  I found a mountain of various contractors available to do most of what I needed.  Within a couple hours I had a sizable list of contacts that I called the next day.  From start to finish it took me less than a week to find a suitable replacement.

This is annoyingly ironic, because I’m relatively sophisticated in terms of online information — I mean most of my work is related to online information in some fashion.  But for whatever reason, it didn’t occur to me to use Craigslist.  And that probably cost me 6 weeks.

The lesson here is, forget Google, forget the Yellow Pages, forget the BBB site.  Just start with Craigslist.

One of the side benefits I found with this is the folks who post there necessarily have email and know how to use it.  This makes a huge difference in speeding up conversations when you can just email plans, designs, and lists.  If they have a Gmail account, even better, because then you can collaborate over Google Docs–in real time if necessary.  Talking to someone over the phone while working together on the same live document is radically faster than the old analog way.

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