'Friend'-ly Remodeling Can Leave Relationship Needing Repairs

There's something slightly romantic about the notion of hiring contractor friends or local, self-employed guys to do jobs around the house and yard.

If I have to pay for the service anyway, I'd rather line the pockets of someone I already know and can trust with the key to my front door. I'd much rather do business with a scrappy entrepreneur who gives me his cell phone number and will come right over if I call with an emergency than rely on a big business that gives me an 800 number and a four-hour window a week from Tuesday.

I've had great success with a few of these go-getter one-man shows in and around College Park. Some of them are specialists, like plumbers or HVAC techs, but they're so handy and skilled that they can fix almost anything. And they're willing to. Unlike techs dispatched by, well, dispatchers, they don't mind taking an extra few minutes during a house call to point out and maybe even solve a problem besides the one you called them about.

I met my new plumber, for instance, when he married my nail tech/friend who worked in a salon in Westchester Park. During past visits to repair a water shut-off valve or do fall maintenance on my gas furnace, he has discovered a crack in my 50-year-old laundry sink that was about to send the concrete basin crashing to the floor and a loose connection in my dryer vent that was pushing hot, linty air back into the house instead of out of doors.

A carpenter I met at the College Park Home Depot a few years ago became a trusted handyman who could figure out how to resolve anything, even when others deemed the job impossible. It took him all of two seconds, for example, to realize he could replace my upstairs bathtub faucets by cutting the kitchen wall behind a cabinet instead of sawing through the 50-year-old ceramic tile that is such a weird shade of pink I could never find replacement pieces the same color. The 18-year-old plumber sent by the big company I had initially called for the job had suggested destroying the tiles and covering up the mess with a piece of white plastic.

It seems that a lot of contractors who strike out on their own are pretty experienced and really are jacks of all trades who rely on word of mouth to get their names around. So they do "relationship marketing"—whether they know what it's called or not—that involves going the extra mile for each client because they are their own bosses and so are authorized to make the decision to stay an extra minute to be a little more helpful.

Still, I've had some equally horrible experiences with the same kinds of contractors who didn't show up when scheduled, neglected to finish the job at all and ran way over budget without mentioning it until the job was finished.

If you feel good about hiring the little guys, set the relationship up for success. Avoid my four biggest contractor missteps, and perhaps your job will go smoother—and you'll have a handy helper/friend for life:

1. Brother, beware. It's overwhelmingly tempting to help out a relative who's trying to get his contracting business off the ground, but don't do it. It would be better for you to simply donate seed money for the business than to offer a job to a relative. If something goes wrong, one of you is going to blame the other one—forever. When you want or need a repair or some remodeling at your house, you're going to want the job done on time, the right way and for a fair price. If your relative misses work or makes a mistake, your relationship will never be the same.

2. Carve it in stone. Your old friend's handshake is all the contract you need, right? Wait until one of you misunderstands what the other one meant. Then who's right? Who pays for the mistake? Do not rely on your memory or on oral agreements. Insist on a written contract—signed by both of you—that lists every single detail of the job, how much you will pay, how often you will pay, who is responsible for the cost of materials, when the job will be completed and who owns the leftover supplies. Never make the final payment until the job is 100 percent complete, even if your contractor pal is stone-cold broke.

3. Open the door. Friends and relatives are likely to be shy about discussing money with you. They might feel guilty for charging you at all. So they might not say so when the job winds up costing more than the estimate, or they might cut you such a good deal that they'll resent doing the work for peanuts. Ask your contractor once a week whether he's on schedule and on budget. Don't count on him to reveal problems to you unless you ask.

4. Evict squatters. My father-in-law calls a contractor who promises to finish in two weeks but isn't halfway through in two months a "squatter"; he's taken over your house and doesn't seem to be in any hurry to move out. A friend or a relative figures you will understand if he can't honor his commitment to you when a better job comes along or he gets an invitation to do something more fun than work. The trouble is: You probably won't understand. It's no fun living in a torn-up house while your contractor is off doing who-knows-what. Agree up front what time the contractor will show up and leave each day, and whether he will work every day or just once a week. Set a date for the last day of the job. Renegotiate as needed—but get that job finished as soon as possible.

Sharon O'Malley is a freelance writer who has lived in College Park for 12 years.