Hiring & Contracts

The worst structural repair I ever reviewed on a claim was done fast, cheap, and by a crew that was three states away by the time the wall moved again. The homeowner had picked them because they could start Monday and the quote was half of everyone else’s. Structural work is exactly the kind of […]

Part of my job is comparing the estimates that come back to an engineer’s office for the same repair, and the spread is often two-to-one for what should be identical work. The difference almost never comes down to one contractor being greedy. It comes down to what each one included, what they assumed, and what

I learned what a mechanic’s lien was the hard way, when a subcontractor I had never met filed one against a property I owned because the general contractor I paid never paid him. I had paid in full. It did not matter. The lien sat on my title until it was resolved, and I could

Ask anyone who has lived through a repair job what surprised them most, and a striking number will say the same thing: the final bill was nothing like the estimate, and they never quite understood how it got there. The mechanism almost always has a name, the change order, and its unmanaged cousin, scope creep.

A contractor handed one of our owners a “lifetime warranty” on a foundation repair and she felt reassured, right up until the wall moved again three years later and she read the actual document. It covered the specific brackets against manufacturing defects. It did not cover the wall continuing to move, which is the only