Most homeowners remodel their homes only once in their lifetime. Your neighbor is no different. When you are in the market for qualified home remodeling professionals, ask your neighbor for a referral, but also talk to other professionals who have lots of experience with the kind of person you are looking for.

Finding Qualified Remodeling Candidates

The best resource for referrals to great designers and remodeling contractors are home-equity lenders. They not only determine how much they’re going to lend you by looking closely at lots of design drawings and appraising the change in value this project will bring to the applicants’ home, but they often visit the jobsite before they release a payment to the contractor. They know which designer’s drawings are complete and which are sloppy, and they know which contractors do good work and which don’t.

You might also ask realtors, appraisers, property insurance adjusters, nonprofit housing program managers, your local municipal government’s planning staff, and other professionals in the business. Soon enough, you’ll begin to hear the same names turning up over and over again, and these are your best candidates.

Finding the Perfect Home Remodeling Consultant/Contractor for You

There are no guarantees of course, but the probability of getting a great product or service for your money increases with the number of times your consultant has successfully completed other projects just like yours.

If you hire a nuclear physicist to design the repair of your roof, I doubt you’d be happy with what he’d recommend. You would be paying him a fee to learn a new craft, and his first attempt at problem solving in an unfamiliar field would probably not be very successful. This will also be true of other types of consultants. Always look for a long, proven track record of successful completions of projects just like yours in the consultant’s resume or portfolio.

Check References

Interview the candidates about the jobs they’ve finished in the last two years, and especially about the jobs that resembled yours. Ask open questions; not questions that can be answered with a yes or no. For example, if you ask your contractor how long he’s been in business, he may say "10 years." What have you learned? Not much. But if you ask him how he got started in the contracting business, you’ll hear all about what his father did for a living, and how he came up through the ranks working for a larger firm before he started out on his own. Or you’ll hear that he got laid off from a dot-com start-up and needed something to do to pay the bills. Either way, you’ll have learned quite a bit more.

Talk to Past Remodeling Clients

Ask about the nature of the relationship they had with this contractor. Was he respectful of their property and their time, was he organized, did he communicate comfortably with them.

Listen to Those Little Hairs on the Back of Your Neck

If you get the feeling that you just couldn’t work with one of the candidates, don’t do it. You could be right, and 50% of the success of the job rests on good chemistry.

More Information

You’ll find lots more information about finding great professionals in Chapter 1: Management Tools, in Managing a Renovation: Staying in Charge and Out of Trouble, our friendly and comprehensive guide to remodeling management. Download the table of contents and a sample chapter, or go to the Order Form to purchase it.

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