Hiring a contractor? Get educated.
Doctors, lawyers, and auto mechanics: the deck is stacked against you, Poor Consumer. Add to that list the contractor.
Licensed Florida contractor Kia Ricchi in her book Avoiding the Con in Construction, to be released on April 25, 2010, spends quality time exposing some of the fraudulent techniques of unsavory building and remodeling contractors.
Yet her book is far more than an indictment of these CONtractors (as she calls them). It's a blitzkrieg education in how to work with contractors, with an emphasis on what many homeowners may consider the "boring" side of the process: contracts, insurance, permits, process, and so on.
Boring? Not in Ricchi's hands. Anyway, this is the stuff of reality (contractors = contractors, get it?). Miss this information and you've missed 95% of it.
One special note: Check out Kia's site, if only for the nice set of clear how-to's and videos about topics like roughing-in, liens, foundations, sitework, etc.
Image: Kia Ricchi
Comments
Thanks for the link to her website. That already helped me a lot.