They are crooked and incompetent. They disappear under the full moon, leaving walls half-plastered and faucets running drier than the Sahara.
They are the one rogue Balzac seems to have missed: the clipboard-wielding, calculator-tickling, sun-leathered building contractors who have dollar signs for eyes and speedy red pickup trucks for quick getaways.
So, at any rate, goes the stock view, the caricature. But what is the contractor`s version of the intense, difficult, often maddening enterprise of building or remodeling a house? Pull up a two-by-four and listen to them confront the ”myths.”
You will never, ever get a contractor on the phone.
”Come on,” said Hal Bernstein, of Dunsmore & Co. in New York. ”It`s more like, you can never escape a client.”
From the moment he breaks ground, a contractor surrenders every square foot of his private life. ”You try to fend off giving out your home number and your beeper, but they get them anyway,” Bernstein added.
”Then they call. At midnight. At 1 a.m. `I`m worried,` they explain,
`about the baseboard. It`s flush, but maybe it should be out an eighth of an inch.`
”You can`t say, `Are you crazy? I`m feeding my kid. I`m in bed.` You say, `Really? I`ve been thinking a lot about that too.` ”
Fine. But what about money? Isn`t it true that contractors always overcharge?
”If you happen to be an honest contractor,” said Bernstein of this, the trade`s most deeply entrenched stigma, ”over and over you`re faced with having to convince people you`re not taking them.”
Wendy Jordan, editor of ”Remodeling Magazine,” a publication that caters to contractors, said: ”The guys who charge less aren`t going to be as reliable. They don`t have insurance, they don`t have somebody answering the phone and they don`t do a good job scheduling.”
So how do you convince clients that you are honest?
”You don`t hide information,” said Bill Harriman, a contractor in Aspen, Colo. ”You pay lots of attention. You communicate all the time. And you give them good value.”
But doesn`t a client`s ”good value” disappear the moment the contractor makes the tiniest change?
”Another myth,” said Richard Loring of Archetype Inc., in Venice, Calif. ”Contractors don`t get rich on changes. They interfere with scheduling, and they never throw off enough profit to cover all the extra time and labor.”
Everyone knows that contractors discount for cash, never reveal the true cost of even a bag of cement and play a whole range of money games.
”What about clients?” Loring said. ”One of the strangest things I`ve found is that they are loathe to reveal their own budget. One of our worst experiences was with a client who asked if he could owe us $40,000 and then went to the subs directly and asked them to work for him.”
Apparently, bypassing the contractor is not all that uncommon. ”Clients try to make deals with the subs all the time in order to avoid our overhead,” Bernstein said. ”If it`s something small, you let it go – there`s not enough money involved. But if it`s a big job, you have to fight for your take.”
A house, he said, is the one item in modern society people do not feel obligated to pay for after they have ordered it. ”It`s not like a couch,” he added. ”Every project is a completely new, never-been-built-before creation. If they don`t like the result, they try not to pay you. It`s crazy.”
OK, OK. But no matter how honest a contractor is, he will inevitably run way over schedule.
Jonathan Brooks, of Building Blox Construction in Los Angeles, suggested that one consider a client`s culpability. In the 25th month of what he calls his ”nightmare job” (he said he had never worked longer than 14 months on a project before), Brooks attributed the delay to his client`s habit of taking anywhere from three weeks to three months to make up her mind.
”Because she couldn`t decide where she wanted her electrical fixtures, the house stood framed, unwrapped and untouched during the entire summer of 1990,” he said. ”I warned her, `You can`t do this. You`ll ruin the house.`
It was a hot summer. The lumber moved. It twisted. Now, she wonders why the walls aren`t perfectly straight.”
Tynes Sparks, head of a Houston building company that bears his name, said a major reason for delays is that clients are constantly being forced to make decisions beyond their expertise.
”All day long, they`re being asked about colors, the size and shape of windows, plumbing fixtures, hardware, trim,” he said. ”The larger the budget, the harder it is, because you can have anything you want!”
But when there is a mistake, doesn`t that mean the contractor is responsible?
Or, as Brooks put it: ”The architect is the genius. We`re just the slobs that slap it together.
”Look, I`m happy to do things that are sharp and interesting, but I want them to be practical.”
For example, Brooks said, in a recent project, the architect specified 11 pairs of exterior doors, nine of which swung out unprotected from the weather. But contractors are famous for leaving jobs unfinished, right?
”I don`t consider a job done until they stop calling me,” Brooks said.
Jordan advised that the contractor and client work out a preconstruction agreement, adding: ”You say, ceilings are to be completed, for instance, by X time. What does that mean? Drywall? Paint? Molding?”
Even when contractor and client agree on terms, there is still the telltale punch list at the end of every job. ”You know how your mind erases pain?” Sparks said. ”Picture this: a grown woman climbing into a cabinet to look for a crooked screw – inside, mind, and out of sight!”
Loring said he believes that a client has a right to expect a high level of finish. But a punch list of 32 single-spaced pages, most of them paint items that the client could not find again when the painter showed up? Or the rough spot underneath the lip of a counter?
So, contractors are basically insensitive, callous-handed types lacking in diplomacy?
Wrong. Perhaps the most delicate aspect of the building trade is the unspoken expectation that the contractor will function as therapist when his clients disagree.
The closer the client and contractor become, however, the harder it can be to address certain issues in their own relationship; for example, when a client runs out of money and the contractor has to stop advancing funds. ”You have to repress a lot of things that in a simpler relationship you might be more willing to express,” Loring said.
