Lew Sichelman
The complaints about contractors hired to do work around people’s homes are legion. They go something like this:
“The guy I hired to remodel my kitchen was never on time, didn’t even show up for several days, and took forever to finish.”
“Yeah? Well, my contractor never finished the job at all; I had to get somebody else.”
“You think that’s bad? My contractors did the work, but they did it all wrong. I had to hire someone else to rip out what they did and start over.”
Yes, these kinds of things do happen. But contractors and tradespeople have tales of their own to tell. From their point of view, it’s not always their fault when things don’t go smoothly.
‘Nightmare of a Job’
Take the guy who said he usually starts work at 7:30 a.m., but was asked by the homeowners at one job if he could begin at 9:30 instead. The contractor agreed, but when he arrived at that time, he was asked to come back between 10:30 and 11. Again, he agreed, even though he’d lost almost half a day’s work at that point.
When he showed up the second time, “everyone was still getting out of bed,” he said, and the room he was supposed to work in was full of stuff, including the bed. Two days later, the bed had yet to be moved, plus the owner’s dogs were running around the contractor as he tried to work, he said.
When he finally finished this “nightmare of a job,” the owner made him wait another week to be paid.
So, sure – there are a lot of lousy tradespeople out there, and homeowners should do their best to sniff them out before signing a contract. But many contractors believe homeowners are the reason projects become problems. And some think it’s gotten worse since the pandemic.
“Since COVID,” one contractor posted on Reddit last year, “customers are becoming increasingly just awful people.” He said he’d been on a run of crummy customers and called the experiences “exhausting.”
Dozens of fellow tradespeople commented on the post, most of them agreeing with the exhausted contractor.
One commenter wrote that the pandemic “gave people too much time on Pinterest and HGTV. All those remodel shows that edit a four-month gut job into 45 minutes [give people] a warped sense of reality and completely unreasonable expectations.”
Tradespeople: Protect Yourself with Contracts
Of course, the contractor should set the rules before a contract is signed: They should explain the process to the homeowner from beginning to end, including permitting, demolition, reconstruction and possible changes. They should also discuss how to bring up concerns when the project doesn’t seem to be going right.
But that doesn’t seem to register with some clients. One landscaper had a customer who walked around the yard with a tape measure to make sure the new flower beds were “exactly, to the inch, the size they were drawn on the plan.” But “this isn’t carpentry,” said the landscaper. “I am digging dirt.”
One contractor said some of their clients seem fine during the planning stages, but as soon as construction begins, “all hell breaks loose.” They said clients often “delay decisions that extend the project timeline and then act like it’s our fault the project is taking longer.”
Another worker told of the homeowner who taped down all four toilets in her house and placed signs on them that read “DO NOT USE.” The contractor had to rent a portable toilet for the workers for the duration of the project.
WFH Turns into Micromanagement
Other contractors complained of being micromanaged.
“Nobody leaves their houses anymore, so they are always in your business,” one posted. “Every job this year has been 100 percent ‘owner-occupied’ for us.”
“I don’t know where these people come from,” posted another. “It’s like they expect you not to make a living, do an incredible job, give them more than they paid for and then be grateful they didn’t yell at you to tear it all out.”
Many contractors have learned to nip that sort of thing in the bud. Call it bad-client radar, or just listening to your gut.
Said one, “I’ve walked away from three quotes this year because the alarms were screaming at me” that the clients would be awful to work with.
“When I go bid [on] a job,” one contractor noted, “I’m also interviewing the customer, for things like: Are they going to be watching me the entire time I work? Are they going to nitpick every little detail in [the] material they picked out? Are they going to change their minds 100 times?” They said they either raise prices to reflect annoying customers or flat-out refuse the job.
Another said they do a full background check, including social media, on all potential new clients: “They do the same on us, so I feel it’s totally fair.”
And if things go south after the work commences, some tradespeople aren’t afraid to walk away. Some use the “I think it’s best if we part ways” approach, while others just cancel contracts midstream.
“I’ve had to fire two customers this year,” one contractor posted. “Overbearing, picky and obsessive.”
Lew Sichelman has been covering real estate for more than 50 years. He is a regular contributor to numerous shelter magazines and housing and housing-finance industry publications. Readers can contact him at lsichelman@aol.com.
