Construction Guide for Hiring a Contractor

Hiring the right contractor for a remodeling project can feel like searching for a needle in a haystack. You dream of finding someone skilled, reliable, and affordable—someone who shows up on time, communicates well, and delivers exactly what was promised. But let’s be honest: that dream doesn’t always match reality. Many homeowners quickly discover that the process can be overwhelming and full of unknowns. With so many options and so much at stake, how do you separate the pros from the pretenders?

Whether you're upgrading your kitchen, adding a room, or giving your home a fresh new look, choosing the right contractor is one of the most important decisions you’ll make. This article will walk you through the process—step by step—so you can feel confident, informed, and empowered as you turn your house into the home you’ve always wanted.

If every homeowner with a remodeling job gets a top contractor who comes highly recommended, puts in 10-hour days, and always finishes on time, then who hires all the other guys? And when the economy is strong, loan rates are low, and a lot of homeowners are remodeling, how can you snag these top contractors? The search can be time-consuming and frustrating, and many contractors you call may be unavailable.

Locating the right contractor takes legwork: developing leads, tracking down referrals, verifying recommendations, conducting face-to-face interviews, and keeping track of the one who seemed so forthcoming and the one who rubbed you the wrong way.

The ideal shortcut is to hire a contractor recommended by a trusted friend or neighbor who has just finished a project like the one you have in mind—a situation where you’ll be able to find out about costs, schedules, attitudes, and see the results firsthand. Short of that ideal, the best bet is to leave a lot of time for the search and to start with the biggest possible pool of qualified contractors. You can get names from many sources that generally fall into two categories: referrals and recommendations. Referrals come from advertisements—for instance, the side of a truck or a card posted at the lumberyard. There is no screening involved; they are just names.

Recommendations carry more weight than referrals because they include an evaluation—say, from a friend or neighbor, your home-owners’ insurance agent, mortgage banker, real estate agent, or someone else in the housing business who knows what you want.

Before you start weeding out candidates, also consider the Internet. In a typical Web search, you’ll get lost in lists of contracting firms halfway across the country. But keep looking and eventually you will hit trade associations, such as the National Association of the Remodeling Industry (NARI, at www.nari.org), and a growing number of Internet-based contractor-referral services. Several on-line referral services are dead ends; either too new or too disorganized to use. You scroll through snappy-looking option screens (and ads to click on, of course), but when you finally start to zero in, it turns out that only a few states and counties can be searched—and yours is not among them.

But fully operational sites, such as www.improvenet.com, one of the largest referral services with a national database of 600,000 contractors, help to make a match. You submit the particulars of your job and receive a list of screened contractors that omits anyone who has been in business less than three years and does not have a clean legal and credit record.

The service is free to consumers; contractors pay for the referrals. It’s a good way for them to get leads and screen out homeowners who aren’t really serious about starting a project in the near future and are just shopping for ideas. A typical response, via e-mail, may give you four local names within 48 hours. But there is no guarantee that these contractors will be agreeable, work for the price you have in mind, or produce high-quality results. All that is for you to discover.

By whatever method, gather as many names as you can, and make the basic checks with local consumer protection agencies and the Better Business Bureau to find out if the contractor has a license plus a record that is free of consumer complaints.

Finally, the contractor must be available to do the job—but not immediately without a good explanation. You can’t be the only one to find the guy. If he’s good, a lot of people want him, and you may have to get in line.