You’re doing a costly home reno and you figure, I’ll run this job myself to save money. I manage people at work, how hard can it be? Here’s why you need a professional running things on your job site.
- Time and Money: A professional General Contractor will keep track of schedule and budget, optimizing downtime and anticipating next steps, which will save you time, money, and aggravation in the long run.
- Management: A build site has its own ecosystem. A good GC will know how to coordinate the different independent specialty workers so that their time is managed efficiently and they don’t get in each other’s way, as well as know which contractors work well with each other.
- Mess: Who cleans up at the end of the day? Ideally all your individual workers will be responsible for their own mess, but with no oversight, it often doesn’t work out like that.
- Inspections: It is the General Contractor’s responsibility to schedule all inspections and answer any questions from the inspectors about the project. Depending on the job there can be up to 25 different inspection visits — now multiple that by the 4-hour window most inspectors require. Are you still saving money?
- Insurance: Injuries on the work site are not very common but a General Contractor will have an umbrella policy that covers all the employees on site. If you don’t have a GC on the job coordinating this, you have to trust that all your individual workers that have their own insurance or it will fall on your homeowners policy – and most policies will not cover all those expenses if something really goes wrong. I can not emphasize this enough: Make sure your contractor has the correct amount of insurance to cover your home, not just some bullshit policy he got to renew his license. All day long I hear contractors say they are insured for up to $500,00 but your house and belongings may be worth over 1 million. So who pays the difference when they ruin it?