This is a How To that might not make everyone on Angry’s List happy but it is something that really should be talked about. When you are dealing with a professional contractor you should expect that they perform their work accurately and with high quality but there are times when tiny little things end up turning a project into a nightmare for a contractor and the home owner that hired them.
Consider this that any two cans of paint will not match. This is absolutely true but most people just don’t understand this. Even if you are working with unopened base white straight from the factory there will be tiny differences that you may or may not be able to tell the difference of when it is applied to your wall. Even if you use the same can of paint that the wall was previously painted with there are factors such as pigments settling or the discoloration of the paint on your wall from dust, dirt, tobacco smoke or just life. A new box of siding from the same manufacturer made months or years apart will never match the existing siding on your home because of UV rays that have changed your siding or even if two boxes of siding are new you have a chance that the pigments used in the plant do not match exactly because one batch of siding was made on a Friday and the other on a Monday.
So many factors can be out of the ability of your contractor to control but when the job is done and the home owner can see slight differences or even really apparent differences the contractor gets a call back from the customer only to have to go through a long explanation of what they want is pretty much impossible.
This is why as a home owner you have to realize that good workmanship does not mean perfection. If you expect too much you are going to lose a contractor you could depend on just to find out that no one else can do any better.
What If You Are Unhappy With The Workmanship
If you are unhappy with the workmanship of any project it is your duty to inform the contractor but when you do so you should try to mitigate the problems as much as you can.
If someone is remodeling your kitchen and you have a problem with the cabinets then don’t wait until the counter tops are cut and installed. Tell the contractor as soon as you notice and they will either have an answer for what is different or they will have time to correct their mistake.
I recently spoke with a couple that had a kitchen remodeled and weeks after it was completed one person was unhappy that the tile wasn’t installed in a diagonal pattern as they had requested in their original plan. They were then trying to leverage this difference to get a reduction in the total cost of the remodel. That is really inappropriate because they were living in the home while the remodel was happening and they noticed the difference half way through the install and decided that they would just wait and see if it was something they could live with.
If something is wrong bring it to the attention of the contractor immediately especially if it is something that was previously agreed to. In this case it wasn’t in writing and the workmanship was good but the contractor ate some of the cost just to make the customer happy. That really isn’t reasonable.
Final Note
I hope that everyone gets something from this how to but most of all I hope that the customer understands that the contractor is human too. Mistakes will happen everyone makes them in every profession. Its how everything around that is handled that leads to either a horror story or a job that everyone can be satisfied with.