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10 Things I Learned From Being My Own General Contractor

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One of the foundations of living a good life in today’s times is having a good place to call home. Whether you want a solid, comfortable place with which to pursue your hobbies, recover from the day’s tribulations, and just to be, or whether you want a bachelor pad for your romantic pursuits, or both; a good home is essential to the modern man.

I purchased a home and I decided to be my own general contractor for the renovations. My home was an as-originally-furnished home of the 1970s, and I brought its multi-color painted, green shag carpeted datedness up to a sharply trimmed, hardwood-floored modernity while being of a somewhat timeless style. A general contractor is a person hired by the architect or engineer to run the job site, source the labor, follow the schedule, get the materials, and execute the vision of the plan. Here are ten things I learned as my own general contractor.

1. There are good contractors, and there are bad contractors

You will run into both good and bad contractors out there. A good contractor does good work, at good value, follows the schedule, and is honest and doesn’t lie to you. A bad contractor will do any or all of the above. I fired a contractor who had good value, but did poor work, could not follow the schedule, and lied to me. I paid more for a later contractor who did excellent work, hit the schedule on time, and was a perfectionist. Give a bad contractor a second chance, mainly to see how he corrects it; and, if he fails to shape up, cut him loose.

A good contractor has the correct amount of paperwork, but no more. Some firms I turned down did things by hand and had no contractor’s license, and that is too little, whereas a firm that gives you fifteen pages of legalese allowing them to take out an uncontested mechanic’s lien on your home if you do not pay is too much.

A lot has to do with the presentation of the representative. Tradesmen are naturally rough people who work with their hands, but a man that does not have a good handshake, good eye contact, and is evasive on important details is shady.

2. Good contractors cost more, and they are busy

The best indicator of a good contractor is that they have a busy schedule, and I mean they are booked often a month or so in advance. The guy I fired kept trying to work me in on the weekends and at night, which, while it SEEMS like he’s busy, he’s actually operating in the red and trying to use your funds to cover his other jobs.

A good contractor will negotiate terms up front and not change them, and he will, when awarded the job, put you in his schedule at an agreed-upon time. My best contractor was so busy that I had to do other things first before I could get his firm to bid my work, and they did what good contractors do when they are too busy; they turned down my work until later.

3. You need to establish a reputation

General contractors in an area have a reputation amongst their customers and the contractors they sub-contract to, and the only difference between those that do it for a living and you is that you have no reputation.

A busy contractor will work with a GC who will give them work in the future over one who will not. I was an unknown, so the busy guys during the busy season (fall and pre-holidays) would pass on me and work with ones they knew.

However, word got around to the others that I gave jobs of good scope, and paid on time. I hired a sub contractor for a set of jobs, and, once they found out who I used as my electrician (it was who they subbed their own electrical jobs to), they called and the electricians vouched that I was picky as all hell, but paid on time, and let them run their own schedule and have the run of the house. At that point, I was in.

4. Good contractors know other good contractors

When men stand united, they become an indomitable force.

Reputation works the other way too. A good roofer who I only turned down because he was too busy and wouldn’t meet my timetable has a brother who runs the electrical shop mentioned above. Although you should ALWAYS get multiple competing quotes (bid to three, two will generally respond, and pick the better one), the deciding factor was that his brother, the roofer, ran a good shop, and it stood to reason he would, too.

My plumbers knew my AC guys and my chimney guy. My flooring guys knew my kitchen cabinets guys. Everyone works with and around everyone else, and I saved all my paperwork and contact info for all my vendors so that, on any future projects, I know who to call for what, and, even if I don’t know, I know who to ask for recommendations.

5. It will take more money than you think it will

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Home renovation is expensive, and it’s mainly for the nasty reason that, once you commit to action, you can get hit with extra costs. You can mitigate this with good bid scopes that you give to your contractors so all parties know what is what, but you will find that the home will need things you didn’t think about, or that the hourly rate of the laborers is higher than you budgeted, or materials will simply cost more.

Part of the balancing act that is required is you will learn what to spend money on now, and what to spend money on later. Right now, I live in the place (finally), but I still have construction paper down on my floors as I have not yet bought furniture pads or rugs for the high traffic areas. My bathrooms have plumbing in, but no mirrors, cabinets, towel racks, or toilet paper holders. Entire rooms are without furniture. All of these can, and should, be taken care of later, but things like flooring and painting needed to happen earlier.

6. It will take more time than you think it will

You may not need something this complicated, but a Gantt chart shows dependency of one job on others.

Contractors have their own schedules, and there is also the time outside the work time where they have to arrange a site visit, you have to juggle quotes, they have to then write you in, then they do the work, then there’s follow-ups and punch-lists, and then, finally, that job is done and you pay them.

You can’t do some other jobs before you finish the first one. This is where having a master schedule and knowing who is doing what and affecting whom matters. My floor guys had to have the run of the place when they were finishing the floors, but they did not when they were laying sub-floor, and I was able to have plumbers in that day as well. Contrariwise, I could not start the kitchen install until after the floors were done.

7. Some of your ideas are wrong, some are right

I had my own thoughts about what to do with the place. Sometimes I was wrong; it was stupid to try to reuse the baseboard that was over the carpet and put it over the hardwood (even though it was the same color) and I listened to my contractor and used new.  Sometimes I was right, my backsplash behind my sink was supposed to match the counter-tops’ colors, and the ratio of white I wanted was correct, but I was persuaded to add more by my contractor.

Know what is important in your vision and be able to explain your intent, but the contractor might have a better way of how to do it in mind than if you had told them the how, instead of the what. I have a rather creative way of running the drains on my basement fixtures; they did what I wanted, but did it in a better way than I would have suggested, and they got it almost completely right to my intent in the process.

8. There will be gaps in your manpower coverage

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The one thing a professional general contractor does that you, as a private operator, will not is do all the basic stuff themselves. A GC will hire an electrician to wire fan boxes for mounting fans, but he will install the boxes and hang the fans himself. My electricians did install and hang them for me anyway.

This was for two reasons, and this is how you can mitigate having little shit jobs that no one will want to do as a single job. The first is to provide all the materials yourself, which also allows you to pick out what you want. I had a pile of fixtures, fans, and bulbs laid out for them with a plan of what went where, and this helped them just throw them up after the technical wiring part was done.

The second reason is to provide a good scope of work. Will a plumber come install a single faucet? Maybe. Will he come install five and a garbage disposal? Certainly, that’s a good day’s work, so, if you have little jobs, have a LOT of little jobs, and you’ll get more interest.

9. There are things with which you will not be satisfied; good enough is good enough

This house is old, but renovated. Some things simply cannot be fixed without massive upheaval; I cannot have perfectly flat ceilings because the drywall is 40 years old and it had popcorn texture on it. Some things I did not address; I have new baseboard and new window trim, but the door trim is original and has the nicks and stains of time.

Some things were done, but were not perfect. The drywall where my kitchen cabinets’ bulkhead used to hang  from the ceiling has one spot where, even after two reworks, still has a hairline paint crack. Some of the window film has pull away lines, and there’s a couple things trapped under the film in places. One of the toilets will top itself off for a few seconds signifying a small seal issue. You cannot have perfection, but you can go for reasonable excellence.

10. Code enforcement sucks

The Man sucks. Someone called Code Enforcement on me, and I had to go get a permit of a cost of X% of the renovation’s cost, mainly so they can jack my taxes up.

I got the permit, and I expect my taxes to go up. The inspector was a real schmuck, as most appointed officials are, but the joke’s on him, as I only got the permit on what I had left to do and I omitted some things that would still happen, but weren’t too noticeable.

With code enforcement and county ordinances, the idea is reasonable cooperation and being able to explain things away with saying you were mistaken, instead of flouting the law. I went and got the permit when I was busted for it, but they only know a third of the story. Had I gotten a permit earlier, perhaps whatever nosy neighbor that ratted me out might not have called at all. Another tactic, which I will do on a future project I have planned, is to get the permit months ahead of time, then hit it hard over a few days and be done before anyone notices.

Conclusion

If you have the time, the patience, and the skill to know exactly what you want, who to get for it, and how to juggle a massive schedule, running your own home renovation is a lot of fun and very educational. If you want it done faster and just want to deal with one person for everything, then hiring a professional general contractor might be the way to go instead.

Read More: 14 Essential Subjects That We Will Teach Children At The ROK International School

139 thoughts on “10 Things I Learned From Being My Own General Contractor”

  1. You’re a complete moron for not getting permits. 1) you’re stealing from your community because in effect they are subsidizing your standard of living 2) The inspectors make contractors stay on the up and up with you and the inspectors make them fix anything they didnt do properly…in reality they work in your best interest

    2. Depending on where you live and what renovations you are doing, some permits are just the city wanting to make money.
      I helped my dad with renovating his house and he wanted to remove a door and replace it with a window, city said the permit for that would be about $5000 because it involves changes to the exterior of the house.
      That is just bullshit.

        1. On the other hand its nice to know someone is making sure your neighbor’s not building something that’s going to fall on you.

        6. On foot, usually yes. On bicycle, almost always. In the car, no, because I can get easily caught.
          It drives me mad how people are stupid enough to keep standing instead of walking when its perfectly safe just because of a “red light”. Stupidity 500%. I hate it, hate it, hate it.
          Simple-minded moronic rules.

        8. Yeah, I’m an anarchist at heart. I am in constant cognitive dissonance with the idea that it may not really “work”. Not sure how to solve it yet.

        10. I always had this kind of issue, you know. I am very prone to give too much understanding to other people. They will come up with whatever bullshit reason for why they want something and I will feel guilty and just give in, “because they have a good reason”. I always told myself: Well, me wanting something is hardly a “good reason”. Ironically, others wanting something was. The perplexity of “altruism”.
          So I am kinda rebelling against it and hating the hell out of it. Fuck what others want. I just want what I want and that’s all I care about.

        11. “Well, me wanting something is hardly a “good reason”. Ironically, others wanting something was.”
          I’ve been there. It’s mind-boggling.
          I wouldn’t call it altruism though because it’s not voluntary. Obedience and Rebellion (and altruism) all have they’re place, as long as YOU’RE the one deciding which and when.

        12. I don’t know how to decide, that’s the problem. And you’re right, it’s not voluntary. But it’s like I get this feeling of “I have absolutely no right to be insisting on my childish ideas”, while I perfectly entertain other people’s childish ideas.

        13. I think a part of the problem is that for some reason, I don’t trust my own mind to be making good judgments. Paradoxically, I know I am intelligent. Yet my intelligence sometimes leads me to conclusions that no one else understands and I get shunned for them and I just start believing its me who is crazy.

        14. Afraid I don’t have much of an answer here. All I can say is I’ve had the same mental bouts from time to time. Just have to keep going, get through the day, achieve goals. And of course, NO ONE can MAKE you feel or believe anything.
          gotta run
          Auf Wiedersehn (sp?)

        15. The only solution is population control. I don’t need to stop at a red light. But in a world of 6 billion, we have to have things like traffic lights and asinine rules that must be followed or else the world doesn’t work. That’s how I see it anyway.

        16. Sorry, what do you mean by “in a world of 6 billion”? Sounds like one of those meaningless phrases to me, like “in these modern hectic times” etc

        17. I mean 60 years ago, you could roll through stop signs, pick up hitchhikers, park illegally, etc. and it wouldn’t really affect things. Today with increasing urban populations and traffic that looks like this, you need a red light on every corner or else the system just doesn’t flow. They just built the first 5 story flat in my neighborhood, full of 2 story homes, and I’m feeling like the old man get off my lawn already.
          http://www.teamrunsmart.com/getmedia/c93fda40-b7e8-487a-a7c7-5eedc8b6f4f7/french.aspx?width=350&height=356

        18. Oh. Yeah, I get why they are useful (although there may be alternatives). What I hate is that police will fine you for crossing the red light in cases where clearly no car is near. And when you tell them its bullshit they will justify it with some totally ridiculous claim about “tiny tiny cars deep at the ground that are easy to miss with the blank eye”. Smh

        19. Yeah, the whole culture has changed. It’s now about following rules for the sake of the rule itself, without regard to any safety or common sense. The TSA is going to poison the minds of a whole generation to become automotons.

        21. On that, I find the bicyclists who like to pretend that they’re cars to be extremely grating. That foolishness just isn’t safe.

      2. 5000 for a window permit is a lot of money….glad I don’t live in your neck of the woods 🙂

        1. That is the local base permit for making a visible change to the exterior of the house.
          A neighbor bought land and wanted to build a house on it, the permit for that was about $60,000 from what I heard.

    3. …or you could not be a retard, check Angie’s List, and the government could not stick their nose into your life. And I say this as somebody who works in the regulatory field.

    2. For more cucking in Sweden, google “Stockholm snow plowing.” There’s a raging controversy about gender neutral snow plowing in the city.The city ordered “feminist” plowing and totally screwed up everything. Got to read to believe.

        4. Feminism= noun, refers to the ideology of people that always fail at what they do then blame it on men.
          Racism=noun, same as above but the blaming is aimed at white men.
          this could go on and on…

    3. Swedish chicks were revered as the hottest in the world.
      Used to be plenty of Swedish au-pairs in NYC – sunning themselves in the park in their undies…drunk at bars at night…
      wtf happened?

        1. I think the Sweedish au-pair agencies were outlawed…
          Now there are fatties from Jamaica (not)babysitting the kids in Central Park…

      2. they became revered as the hottest in the world is what happened, then it went to their heads. Not far from that ROK hall of fame article “the 15 magical years for women”.

      4. “Swedish chicks were revered as the hottest in the world.”
        Blonde inflation. There was -and is- nothing special about Swedish women.

    4. It says the hotline will be partly staffed by “comedians” so that could actually be fun…

    5. What I learned:
      Do not, under any circumstances, do not EVER share an important piece of information with a woman co-worker. Likewise, when women are present, don’t even think about attempting to make workflow more efficient, promoting transparency, or endeavoring to help maintain team focus. It could get you in a shitload of trouble.

        1. Oh, no. I’m just taking what that article says to its logical conclusion. There simply didn’t even seem to be any room left for a male to explain anything to a female, regardless of need or motivation.

        2. Good. Let them figure it out.
          Better yet, let them run in circles like headless chickens.
          That should work as the equivalent of natural selection, which should filter the dregs from the few capable ones. Just make sure that their incompetence can’t be pinned on you and we should see a marked improvement in the workplace in a relatively short time.

    6. To borrow the the immortal words of the Joker.
      “It would be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic. Ah, what the hell, I’ll laugh anyway.”

    7. I honestly felt like throwing up when I read that. I mean my stomach clenched and I became nauseous. Then I felt intense rage, which turned into a white hot hatred.
      Now I want to find the names of every piece of human shit that was involved in that fuckery, because they are now my permanent enemies.
      No mercy, no surrender, no quarter given and by God none asked.

    8. The proper response is to never explain to a woman how to do anything. Then its much easier to fire her when she doesn’t do her job.

  3. I’m very close with a professional general contractor. His small firm is excellent, but the guy has to battle for a day off once a month — that’s how busy it can get when your reputation outruns you.
    In my life, my professional reputation had grown so strong that by 2012/2013 I was turning down work at least once a week. Literally no hours available. It burns you out, though — I ended up leaving the state and going on sabbatical for six months with all my savings.

    1. The local township, boro, city, village, whatever requires you to get permits for certain construction activities. Ostensibly this is to safeguard the general public by seeing to it that you follow accepted codes and standards. In reality its a pain in the ass, and yes you have to pay for them

        1. Like anything in “the public interest” it’s a necessary evil. I certainly wouldn’t trust half of the hacks out there who call themselves ‘contractors’.

        3. But if your choices cause your shit to fall on me, its no longer a private matter.
          Yes it can be a little heavy-handed for private, residential construction, but in the public realm I like to know that someone doubled checked whether there will be a fire exit where I need one.

        4. Well, I don’t agree. To me, that sounds like entitlement. “You need to build stuff so that I feel safe in it”. Fuck that. If you have a bad feeling about my house, just stay away from it.

        5. Damn you type fast….
          I said the permitting frenzy is a little overblown for private houses, yes. And there are some places where you don’t need permits.
          And yes, I feel entitled to a measure of safety in a public building. Giving me a chance of escaping a burning building isn’t that much of an imposition on the owner.

        6. Yeah it kinda is. Fear mongery. How probably is it that a fire will break out while you’re inside? And again, you have a gut instinct and situational awareness so simply stay away from dangerous places. It’s really not that hard.
          They always play on your fears, referring to some outlandish thing that might just happen…

        7. Well I will tell you that the probability of a fire breaking out is very very low BECAUSE of certain regulations!
          I take your point though about situational awareness. I pride myself on it and I’d like to see more of it and less rules.

        10. I had a friend who ran a bussiness with a loading dock in the back, had been running it for years. I came by one day & noticed that a concrete ramp had been installed next to it. He told me that city ordinance now required it, & he had it pay for it out of pocket. My first question was of course how many people do you have regularly fuckin’ around back here in wheelchairs? Not one. Ever. Laugh my fucking ass off.

        11. I worked construction for some time. Dodged stuff like that few times with grandfathering…but serious a wheelchair elevator in a small business would double the project cost…

        15. In Greece, due to our leftist Government, today they protect every year… Mosquitoes! Literally you cannot go to your garden if you want to every summer we become full of them!!! Guess parasites have more rights than taxpayers.

        16. It’s retarded, man. Wheelchair ramps are rampantly (pun!) popping up all over the city, & in places where the thought of handicapped people passing through is improbable, like out by our airport, which is a good five miles from any bussiness or stretch of functioning city. I visited the Garden of the Gods near Denver earlier this year & ran into this at the front of the parking lot: https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/77e7f195175a78e7a754bab04036631e62baebebac8ad4f5d3ae13b2d678615c.jpg

        18. Ecology…
          Hopefully in Greece regulations for buildings are quite few though, and while they add ones about ecology! they completely overlook earthquake safety (somecases whole villages may become empty and towns be burned!!!) you see they cannot make money from the second….

    2. This is an extreme example. Suppose I want to build a huge shopping mall, and pave 40 acres. When a rainstorm hits, the water runs off the paved parking lot onto my neighbors front yard, not good. There are changes in traffic patterns that necessitate road construction, there are utility demands, etc…. Permitting gives the city or county an opportunity to decide whether this should be done, or if it creates a burden on others.
      That is the idea. Problem is, governments like to make things more and more restrictive to the point that it seems like a needless annoyance.

      1. Yeah okay, that kinda makes sense. But from the gist I get about the general implementation, they seem to just be schmucks who come to say “this is okay” and get a shit ton of money for it. I mean, renovating your rooms … wtf does that have to do with city planning?

        1. I completely agree with you on that, problem is the nature of government to continually grow and become more restrictive. They really need to get a life.

        4. People are assholes. I am friends with the owner of my flat. He sometimes tells me stories about this stuff and shares the same contempt for those people.
          He related a story to me where someone had a private property (marked as such) with a bridge on it. Some pedestrians walked in nonetheless and something happened with the bridge and they got hurt and then they sued the owner of the property.
          Some people need to get shot…

        5. Permitting for new construction is a good idea. But in the US in most cities you have to get a permit (pay a fine really) for doing routine things like re-shingling your roof, putting in energy efficient windows, etc.. It is partly due to what the author hinted at–property is taxed in the US and they want to know if you have done anything to make your home nicer so they can raise your taxes. In other words, if you add a swimming pool, they want to start billing you yearly for that pool you just built. You can get out of a lot of it by moving out to the country, outside city limits.

        7. I understand when things affect others, but if it is in the confines of your own home, they crossed the line.

        8. Never understood the law where you can sue someone for not intentionally harming them. Like.. wtf, I’m supposed to be the guardian angel to some stranger who steps onto my property?

        9. Yes, this I forgot to mention. They cost fucking money, lots of money, sometimes. Just another way to bleed more money out of you to use on the city’s worthless projects like section 8 housing.

        12. Or be exterminated! Not kidding if we could wipe out half our provincial government employees and every crack head collecting welfare case we could really get the local economy moving..
          Think of the savings..

      2. They built a subdivision upstream from my dads place which caused the creek to build up to a large pond at the back end of his property.
        He wanted to change out his bridge over there so that it would not be as affected by flooding that is being caused by this and they labeled the pond as a protected wetlands and said that the permits would be about $5000 per square foot of the pond that drained away if we did that.

        2. that is the type of bullshit that ticks me off. They think that all of a sudden, they can declare something as protected, or new zoning and cost a person hundreds of thousands. Well, if it was protected when I bought the property, I wouldn’t have bought the property.

        3. We did a rough estimate given how wide the creek is at the entrance to the pond and found the permit would cost ~$800,000, which is way more than the house and property are worth.

        4. I see that happen all the time. Commercial property deemed a wetland, or residential. But another developer knows the right people and can have zoning switched to his favor.

        5. What really pisses us off about it is that two or three years ago it was pretty much just a dry creekbed that had water when it rained or the snow melted. Then some asshats built a 4000 house suburbia bullshit with parks that are watered and artificial lakes and shit and all the water from this now goes into our creekbed and is slowly eroding the bridge and our land collapses occasionally into it.

        6. Totally these “Green Belt” areas are a total cash grab, above and below the table, and nothing more.

      3. My former local government played fast and loose with its zoning laws for years by allowing myriad McMansion communities to be built without proper drainage and that caused a fairly massive flood that otherwise would’ve been “meh”.
        Permits and licensing are ridiculous, in my experience it is all about hiring the guy who has the best connections with TPTB.

    3. For, say, digging around your house to work on plumbing or mess with a gas line, at it’s basic level is a safeguard for the surrounding area, or, city/town in general, but they are pesky, & like Stranahan said, if you get get a permit early & do the job real quick before the neighbors notice (or do the job real quick without getting one at all, hehe), that’s your best bet. Of course, if you’re renting small construction equipment, or, the bigger (& louder) the job, the more difficult this becomes.
      Hey, speaking of pesky regulations, ya think Trump’s going to drop the ban on Kratom when he steps in? They just gave medicinal weed the go-ahead here in Arkansas. I don’t see much of a big deal about bringing big K back if a couple of guys want to freebase some Krate before they hit the weights…

      1. I would love to believe it, but as far as it comes to substances, I have zero (actually more like -200%) faith in the government. I actually believe they are actively and purposefully trying to ban everything that actually helps people. I really believe that. At least at the top level where people make the decisions. The useful idiots of course believe the nonsensical arguments.

        1. Right? Kratom? Steroids? Bad.
          Birth Control? Sex-change operations? Soon-to-be tax-payer funded. Just around the bend.

        3. I have ot admit the German government does not in any way inspire faith for me..even less so tham my own which isn’t much either..

    4. Multiply what Jim said (which is correct) by 10 billion if you want to do any work in NYC. The rules and regulations governing even minor construction here are draconian to say the least, enforced by a very large and technically savvy police force and complicated as can be. I read at least 200 pages of building code a week. Just knowing stuff like Capital Improvements. For instance, some work is an improvement to the value of the real property and as such is not taxed. I have a 70 page guide book with what counts and what doesn’t.
      It sounds like it would suck but people who can read and analyze boring legal writing and are still savvy in construction can clean up because that Bennet diagram doesn’t have a ton of cross over and is something valued highly by billionaire developers

      1. Argh!
        Seems like my fancy idea to one day be doing manual labor is starting to fall apart. I want to create/build stuff, not become a lawyer.

        1. It’s easier in other Places. NYC is the worst of them. You need to pay someone to do the paperwork for you here. Also the insurance requirements are insane. Just to walk on one of my job sites you need 1m/2m with a 5m ballon on top of your liability and workmans comp

        7. I’ve never done any work outside of manhattan so I don’t know…it’s a pain in the butt isn’t it?

        8. It is with employees being the number #1 PITA I’d say. Especially finding them. # 2 is excess regulation and taxation..
          Finding work is easy…

      2. Just be careful the billionaire developer doesn’t value it so highly that he ends up grabbing someone by the pussy.

  5. A favorite saying: “The work can be done fast, cheap, and good, but you can only have two of the three. Choose.”
    Want it fast and cheap? It won’t be good.
    Want it cheap and good? It won’t be fast.
    Want it good and fast? It won’t be cheap.

    2. This is called the “contractor’s triangle” and has been a sales hinge for contractors for the past 40 years. It’s true, and sensible.

  6. I had a nosy neighbor turn me in also. I ended up not having to pay, but had to go to several meetings and waste dozens of hours of my time (my strategy for getting out of the permit was to distract them, asking for permission to do a huge project, while also asking for forgiveness for the tiny job I had been busted on).
    My question is.. how does nosy neighbor know whether you have gotten a building permit or not? Do they just call up city hall every time someone in the neighborhood is repairing something, and ask if they have gotten permission to do it?

    1. Building permits are usually required to be posted on or near the front door of the building.

      1. Yeah I’ve seen those for big projects. If nosy neighbors are looking for a posted permit, I would just print off something fake and stick it in the window. I don’t think a nosy neighbor would walk all the way up to my door anyway, just get close enough to see some paperwork visible. But if they just call the city, then that won’t work, and could possibly get you in more hot water.
        Some bureaucrat told me I’d have to yank out my energy efficient windows because the old ones were “historic”. I didn’t. My power bill with the super efficient windows was $33 last month. They will have to take the windows out themselves if they want.

  7. Great article.
    As for 10, some 4 years back I started a small side company that did code work, violation curing, lein filing and negotiation as well as expediting and consulting (so we would essentially GC for you) I have contractor connections all over the city, a partner was an attorney, another was a registered architect and one partner was an expedited. we all had good day jobs and thought this would bring a little extra dough. We were making so much money the first year we never realized how many small contractors were in over their head and if we were fair to them we could make a fortune. We also never realized how many people were getting royally fucked just hiring someone because a friend of a friend blah blah blah. After a year we had to decide full time disband because it took too much time. We wound up selling the company for a very substantial amount (compared to what we had invested). All tolled, including profits from the work, we each multiplied out initial investment by 12. Crazy year. But yeah, the guys doing the world trying to get all the t’d crossed get fucked so hard by the man

  8. What kinda of beta bitch fuck boi neighbor calls code enforcement to make sure you have the right permits to build your own god damn house? If i were you id shit on their doorstep everyday for the next year.

    1. I aim to find out, and I will do the flaming bag of dog doo on the porch and videotape it for your enjoyment here.

    2. In most circumstances, yes, they would have to be a busybody with way too much time on their hands. However, if they’re living right next door to Mr. Stranahan then I can see why they might be concerned.
      Mr. Stranahan only hired good workers, but how was his neighbour to know he wasn’t hiring Bodgitt & Leggitt Ltd? Bad contractors can cause damage which extends beyond property boundaries. Nobody wants to be on the receiving end of subsidence, an electrical house fire or asbestos fog because his neighbour was too much of a tightarse to hire reputable contractors.

  9. One thing I learned from being my own general contractor …
    Don’t try to be your own freakin’ general contractor.
    YMMV

  10. I disagree totally about permitting. By pulling permits, you are in essence, conveying responsibility to the city.
    I’ve owned quite a bit of real estate, both commercial and residential, over the years and have renovated both ways. Almost every time I eschewed pulling a permit, something wasn’t done to code and in the process of my buyer’s inspection, this was brought to light. I always had to take a haircut.
    One warehouse I did, the GC didn’t pull permits-it had railings too low, steps & risers not to code, non GFI electrical outlets in the kitchens & bathrooms… I mean on & on. That cost me $25,000 off the selling price.
    Further, should you suffer a loss, your insurance company can refuse payment for non permitted work. Hail damage but a non permitted roof installed? You are SOL pal.
    Yes it costs more. Yes your property taxes will increase. But the aggravation you can suffer is worth avoiding. Believe me, I know.

  11. I work for a construction company. Inspectors, especially newer ones, can be a giant pain in the ass (some are cool though, it just depends). This one rookie inspector would call us on shit that was up to code, but for some reason, he failed us on multiple jobs. The higher ups called the city, but they pretty much told us to deal with it. In the end, we ended up having to use more materials than necessary on every single job from that point forward just because one inspector decided to make life hell. The extra materials cost the company a few grand per year (when added up over time). Whenever dealing with a pain in the ass inspector, I do my best to cooperate and fix whatever he wants to be fixed right on the spot, if possible. You can mention the code, but you have to ease it in or else you’ll end up pissing him off and fucking yourself in the future. The Man truly does suck.

  12. This is the type of article that should be featured more in RoK. I had bad experience with few general contractors and learned my lesson the hard way with huge significant losses. Always always always verify and ask for references and their past work. Drive by the homes they worked on in the past and carefully observe and interview the past homeowners who used those general contractors.

  13. My general rule is that the first time you do something in the trades that you dont know how to do it will cost as much and be slightly lesser quality than a contractor. The second time will be both cheaper and better.

  14. If I call a contractor to come and do an estimate on a job and they give me a lot of drama about doing it I fire them on the spot.

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