Before You Hire A Contractor: A Construction Guidebook For Consumers

By Steve Gonzalez and C.R.C. Steve Gonzalez

Before You Hire A Contractor covers details every homeowner needs to know before hiring a contractor for building, home improvements, remodeling, or other construction projects. This enlightening... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1891264656
• ISBN13: 9781891264658
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: Consumer Press
• Length: 182 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Common sense book

This book has a lot of common sense ideas, most easy to follow, when hiring a contractor. In some cases I could see that following all the advice might cause some contractors to run away and play with somebody who is not a pain in the ***, but the advice is to protect the homeowner and is written in such a way as to be easy to understand. The book lacks a summary of the ideas, which I condensed into 2 pages for our project

Very helpful book

I recently had a house built (I was a first-timer with little experience in construction) and found this a very useful little book. It reinforced the importance of being thorough in checking references and provided concrete information about how to develop a construction contract. I found it extremely useful in developing my Owner's Specifications that were the foundation for my bid request and later became part of the construction contract documents. Use a highlighter to highlight the recommendations as you read this book: the useful tips can get lost in the text, much of which is devoted to consumer horror stories.

Learn about what could go wrong, and how to prevent it.

My highlighter got quite a workout during this easy to read book. Tells about disastrous contractor scenarios, and how they could have been avoided. Lots of matter of fact warnings about contracts, even gives a sample one. There is a very useful section on specifications. He stresses the importance of VERY specific specifications -- right down to how many layers of tar paper. I felt much more nervous after finishing the book because I realized the phenomenal number of decisions ahead of me, but once I started making my list with the help of the book, I felt like I had a handle on it. The list of things to specify could have been a little more complete, which is why a 4 instead of a 5 rating.