Choosing contractors
We had an unusual approach to finding contractors to work on our house.
Our architect is someone we'd talked to before at a sustainable fair. We'd talked about shipping containers as housing but Nathan had discovered that once you start ripping the sides out of shipping containers, they stop being so functional and start bending instead. Slightly sub-optimal for housing one might say. Still he's a good bloke and we had some interesting chats.
Then it turns out the bloke down the street is a builder, aka general contractor as it is known in the US. Pretty handy. I looked around online and his rates seemed okay and his work looked good, and Nathan really wanted him to work on the place so that was done and dusted.
We've been talking to one mob who do house lifts for about a year. They were interested, they are local, they have a good rep, what's not to like?
Then we got the quote and just for the lift, excavations and footings/foundation work, it was uhh 3/4 of our proposed budget. Ummm..... Plus I got pushed into giving them a hefty deposit cheque to get us in their queue for house lifting.
That also was a bit sub-optimal. Plus we needed to get the quote/bid redone as they hadn't taken some stuff into account. I pushed pretty hard for a new quote. We really needed to know what we had to budget for. We were feeling rather stressed - so many things had to happen in a very short space of time.
Our contractor talked to some other mobs that do house lifting, one of which he'd worked with before. We decided that maybe we should go with them instead and were working out how to fire the original lifters when they rang us and told us we weren't worth enough to them - they fired us!
At least we got the deposit back. And we got a new crew to do the lift with only a four week delay in our timeline. Probably a good outcome for all of us.
Something we have discovered is that despite my best efforts at lining up companies, we are probably best off using companies that have a relationship with our builder. As home owners, we are one off deals for various companies - there's no ongoing relationship like there would be with a person whose job is building. There's no particular incentive for them to do a good job beyond personal pride and company name. We might recommend them to friends or neighbours but we won't be using their services again in a hurry. Word of mouth is powerful but ongoing relationships are more so.
Our architect is someone we'd talked to before at a sustainable fair. We'd talked about shipping containers as housing but Nathan had discovered that once you start ripping the sides out of shipping containers, they stop being so functional and start bending instead. Slightly sub-optimal for housing one might say. Still he's a good bloke and we had some interesting chats.
Then it turns out the bloke down the street is a builder, aka general contractor as it is known in the US. Pretty handy. I looked around online and his rates seemed okay and his work looked good, and Nathan really wanted him to work on the place so that was done and dusted.
We've been talking to one mob who do house lifts for about a year. They were interested, they are local, they have a good rep, what's not to like?
Then we got the quote and just for the lift, excavations and footings/foundation work, it was uhh 3/4 of our proposed budget. Ummm..... Plus I got pushed into giving them a hefty deposit cheque to get us in their queue for house lifting.
That also was a bit sub-optimal. Plus we needed to get the quote/bid redone as they hadn't taken some stuff into account. I pushed pretty hard for a new quote. We really needed to know what we had to budget for. We were feeling rather stressed - so many things had to happen in a very short space of time.
Our contractor talked to some other mobs that do house lifting, one of which he'd worked with before. We decided that maybe we should go with them instead and were working out how to fire the original lifters when they rang us and told us we weren't worth enough to them - they fired us!
At least we got the deposit back. And we got a new crew to do the lift with only a four week delay in our timeline. Probably a good outcome for all of us.
Something we have discovered is that despite my best efforts at lining up companies, we are probably best off using companies that have a relationship with our builder. As home owners, we are one off deals for various companies - there's no ongoing relationship like there would be with a person whose job is building. There's no particular incentive for them to do a good job beyond personal pride and company name. We might recommend them to friends or neighbours but we won't be using their services again in a hurry. Word of mouth is powerful but ongoing relationships are more so.
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| And lift company one sails off into the sunset |
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