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Kitchen, Bath or Entire Home Remodeling and Repairs |
The Cost of Saving Money!July 23, 2011 I know without a doubt that budgets are tighter for everyone these days, and bargain hunting has changed from sport to survival. Even In my contracting business I am finding daily that I have to explain the prices I must charge. Some customers decide on the “do it myself” route and try to save the labor and overhead costs that I have to charge. I also must make a profit to stay in business, and customers want to save that profit amount also. Customers often take weeks and months to do a job that we could knock out in days. That is understandable… they are not usually contractors. When finished, the result sometimes is not anything like I could have done for them, and IF I had done that job they would have reported me to the contractor’s board or Better Business Bureau. In addition, work may have been completed without proper permits and inspections and is not completed per the building code. So the ultimate question is: did they save money? Let me tell you 3 short stories from my personal experiences just this week: # 1) I was in the county permit office, waiting for a plan approval for a deck modification to add stairs to a customer’s deck. It was my 3rd trip there for this project. While waiting, I heard a man talking about a $1,300 dollar fine he had to pay for building a deck on his house and then having to tear it down even after paying the fine. He complained that the deck would have cost him five times the fine to have a contractor do it right. Now he has to do what he didn’t do… find a contractor to build it right. In total he lost the money he spent on the deck materials, his time spent building it, the fine for building it wrong, his time for tearing it down, and any expenses for hauling the mess away. #2) While still at the permit office I received a call from a customer I had not talked to in 2 or more years. He was experiencing electrical issues at his home. I went to his house the next day. He had been experiencing intermittent power at several wall sockets, so he went to Home Depot and bought 5 wall sockets to replace the suspect ones. This only made the problems worse. He now had the same problems plus the lights in his foyer quit working along with the porch lights. The problem created by doing it himself could have resulted in a fire or his electrocution. Either of these would have been costly or unfortunate. He should have called a qualified person to test his circuits and fix the problems correctly in the first place. #3) I have a friend in the contracting business that has a large successful company and does a lot of high end deck and patio jobs. He bid a job for an extravagant deck and patio on a very nice home. The price he quoted was over $100k. The homeowner wanted a better deal but was told the price was the price and my friend would not change it. The homeowner sought other bids and got one for $40k less than my friend’s bid. The homeowner asked him to match the low bid or at least come down because he trusted my friend to do a good job. Contractors know that it is very difficult for customers to see the inferred difference in the cost of time and materials and the actual cost of the job for the contractor. This customer was told that there was no way that the contractor who gave that low bid could do the job for that low price, but he decided to go with the low bidder. Now the home has been severely damaged and lawyers have been hired. The cost to repair the damage to the home may not even compare to the loss of funds, the new grading plan and EPA fines for the improper handling of the soils removed to start the patio...not to mention the destruction of the landscape. As it now stands, the money spent to remedy the damage will be about equal to what he could have had the whole job completed for with the right contractor. And after the damage is repaired he still will not have a deck and patio. There is a whole series of shows on HGTV that cover how one contractor makes his living fixing other peoples’ jobs that were not completed correctly. Keep in mind that he has a lot of corporate sponsors who put up a lot of money to pay to have these problems fixed on TV. In real life you have no sponsors, so you must find a contractor you can trust, and you have to pay for the materials and effort to make it right. In my one day examples, a do-it-yourselfer got fined and had to pay to get his mistake fixed. Another one put his family and other members of his condo building in danger and had to have a professional fix what he did not know about. Finally, a bargain hunter experienced a disaster that will be in court possibly for years. In each of these cases a trusted contractor was known and available, but the cost was in their minds too much. I advise customers regularly that they are better off waiting and saving their money until they can afford to have it done right, rather than trying to save money by doing jobs cheaply using half measures. As in the 1st and 3rd cases, sometimes you lose a lot more than what you thought you were saving by doing it yourself or getting a “bargain”. Call us at HPR or NVBWS if you have a need for a remodeling contractor or basement waterproofer you can trust. If the job is too big or something we don’t do, I can recommend other trusted contractors to do your job right.
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