About

My wife and I are a two income household living here in the San Francisco Peninsula - typical to the Bay Area.  When we embarked on our home renovation project, I didn’t intentionally want to become our own general contractor running our project.

However, disaster struck when our general contractor abandoned our project after half our home was demolished and uninhabitable.  I had no choice other than to pick up the pieces and carry on as my own general contractor.

I had been a San Francisco Bay Area homeowner for 8 years prior to our renovation nightmare.  I was previously not very handy - having installed a shower door with a friend, switched out some basic plumbing fixtures was pretty much the only thing I could claim to my name.

But… I was very eager to learn and even more motivated to get our family out of this nightmare.

Being a professional in Silicon Valley, what I did to help myself was to apply everything I had learned in my career about project management, budgeting, cost estimation, contract negotiation, and people management to address our renovation nightmare.  My greatest strength was keeping the eye on the prize, focusing on the big picture, and remaining objective when dealing with a very emotional component of anyone’s life - your own home.

I walk away from our own ordeal with the confidence and understanding of how to function as your own general contractor.  There isn’t anything about residential construction that phases me, thanks to surviving and thriving through our own renovation nightmare.

I know what I have learned from my own experience and I know I don’t know everything.  But… what I have learned the hard way, I intend to market.  I also hope to capitalize on the information products I have spent countless hours and dollars constructing to help those of you who want to take on all or partial ownership of your own remodeling projects, in hopes that the profits will offset the financial losses we have endured.  For those of you frequenting this blog, I hope that I share some valuable tips and information through the stories and articles I post.

I’m writing this blog because I wouldn’t want to wish our experience on anyone who wasn’t prepared in what they were geting into - advertently or inadvertently.