In case you’re wondering who they are (listed in alphabetical order)…

• DiMan Develoments, Emanuel Giassemis, 604-990-1671, diman@telus.net
• Variant Home Services, Dragan Markovic, 604-724-4535, varianthomeservices@shaw.ca

Maybe I should just flip a coin.

• http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/2007/01/contractors.html
  The full episode of Marketplace with Mike Holmes trying to help you avoid getting stuck with an unscrupulous renovator
• http://www.hiringacontractor.com/
  A site from the Canadian Home Builders Association about what and how to get things in writing in order to protect yourself
• http://www.gvhba.org/cons_reno_renomark.aspx
  A few points from the Greater Vancouver Home Builders Association about what renovators agree to provide in order to get thier RenoMark seal of approval.  You may not necessarily looks for this seal, but it might be helpful to ask your potential contractors about each of the points to get thier reaction

Over the past 4 months I’ve contacted about 40 contractors ranging from generals to individual trades and handymen.  The responses have varied from having my voice mail ignored, to only speaking over the phone, to someone coming out to the house, to someone actually responding with some form of quote.  Overall, I’ve received quotes from less than 40% of the contractors I’ve contacted.

This may seem like an awful lot of quotes.  It isn’t really.  If you want 2 or 3 quotes and you’re speaking with generals and individual trades (electrician, plumber, tile, drywall, floor), that adds up to around 15 quotes. 

Of the total number of quotes I got, I’d say about half were clustered reasonably close together in terms of the dollar estimate.  The others were much higher.  I didn’t get any that were lower than the cluster.

So from these 8 or so quotes we rejected 2 because of poor references and poor pre-sales responsiveness.  And then there were 6.

These got chopped down to 2 becuase we decided to go with a general rather than manage all the trades ourselves.  Speaking with the trades however was still valuable because it helped us better contetualize the estimate line items from the generals.  We are now down to just 2 contenders.

The actual search experience didn’t quite flow this smoothly.  On 2 prior occasions we thought we had found the contractor we wanted to work with only for him to reveal a giant red flag that scared us off.  These false starts has added about 10 weeks to the project.

I had one contractor try to berate me for collecting quotes (nice sales technique).  He said I was wasting my time and the time of all contractors. I thanked him for helping to narrow my search and then told him to get out.  Do not let them try to push you around.  You are about to spend a huge amount of money, and take on an emormous amount of risk (they can get away with just about any form of fraud, and there virtually nothing you can do about it).  Talk to whom ever you need to in order to feel comfortable with your ultimate decision.

So This should give you some idea of just how much time and leg work you should expect to do before you’ll find 2 solid contractors (and we haven’t started work yet, so things could still fall apart as they have twice already).

What resources did we use to find contractors?

We’ve used the yellow page, the BBB site, Google, Craigslist, referrals from other contractors, and referrals from friends and complete strangers.  Of our two finalists we found one through word of mouth and the other through Craigslist. 

We did not find any partiuclar resource more or less helpful — they’re all mostly useless.

Here are some other lessons we learned:

• Cast a very wide net, because time combined with pure luck is a big factor in find a good contractor
• If you want 3 quotes, be prepared to contact 8 people
• Don’t be surprised if it take 3 times as long to find your contractor as it does to do the work
• Be ruthless in your vetting process, absolutely call all references
• Do not work with anyone who tries to give you the hard sell — kick them out rudely and immediately
• Negotiate hard to pay only a minimum deposit because your risk burden is much bigger than theirs — these guys can put a lien on your house if you break a contract, but you have virtually no options if they do or if they run off with your money.

GE Miller Website

Thanks to Firefox, Wordpress lost my original post.  I know the fanboys love FF, but through death by a thousand cuts, I keep learning this lesson:  Don’t use FireFox.  From poor stability with flash files, to losing my place when opening new windows, to losing Wordpress posts, FF gives me more trouble than even lousy old IE6 (which come to think of it, has never given me an ounce of trouble).  Okay, rant complete.

My dad sent me a link to home renovator G.E. Miller – too bad they’re on the Island.  Not only do I like their work, but they’ve also posted a series of pdfs with some valuable tips.  Unfortunately they need a new design firm.  This information would have been better as plain HTML, and their site is entirely built in Flash with all the usually navigation and accessibility nightmares.

To find thier tip sheets, hover over “About” and then click “Vision” from the fade-in submenu.  On the right side of the content will be links to all the pdfs. 

More renovators should publish this kind of helpful, non-advertorial content.  It certainly increases their credibilty as people who care about the work and not just making a sale.

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.

Lesson:  Ensure the contractors you plan to use are realiable.  Before you committ to anything, give them some dates and times to get back to with some sort of answer of information.  Do this a couple of times.

So far it has been 2 weeks of delays and stalling… and we haven’t even signed a contract yet.  What can I expect when the work actually begins?

I do have a back up, and might need to use it soon.

Doing the research you find lots of happy stories, and lots of horror stories about contractors.  And the only consistent aspect is that it’s usually impossible to tell what you’re in for till you’re in it.  Scary when you’ve got tens of thousands of dollars as well as months of serious preparation on the line.

One of the folks I’m considering using is making me a bit nervious now.  Adimittedly, I’m probably over reacting.  Still, we haven’t even signed anything yet and he has postponed a meeting 3 times and then promised to get information to me by Sunday night which he hasn’t.  That and the fact that I thought our last I thought that meeting was to sign contracts and set dates, but he wasn’t quite ready yet.

These are fairly trivial, but I’m always looking out for early signs of trouble.  Like I said though, I’m probably over reacting.  But in the spirit of a good blogger, I’m trying to capture some of the raw feelings in renovating, as they happen.