In California,  a licensed general contractor cannot take more than $1,000 as a deposit to start your project.  This is law mandated by the California License State Board.  You hear  of  so many horror stories of contractors running off with large sums of money leaving the poor homeowner with nothing but missing money all the time.

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The contract templates of most interest to you as the homeowner are the “Series A” AIA documents.  These are the agreements set forth between the owner and the contractor.  Remember, in the absence of having an architect perform contract and project administration for your home remodel, you should change the sections to say “Owner” instead of  “Architect” where applicable.  Here’s a brief rundown of what each document is used for…

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By now, you’ve made some sort of decision on whether or not to accept any of your contractors’ bids or to boldly take on your home remodeling project on your own.  In either case, having well drafted contracts and other agreements are an absolute imperative.  It can potentially prevent a lot of heartache in the future when things go awry.  What they say is absolutely true - your home remodeling project will go awry in some form or fashion.   Having your contracts spell out who is responsible for what when things don’t go as plan helps protect everyone involved in the process.

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After you have received all your bids and have “normalized” them by questioning assumptions and variances, it’s time to narrow your selection.  We took the two bids from our two contractors and asked them to sharpen their pencil by going over the bid and adjusting assumptions for finishes before getting to final bids.

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It’ll take at least a couple of weeks if not longer for your solicited general contractors to get back to you with high level numbers.  Make sure you set expectation on when they should get back to you by.  When their proposal and bid is ready, meet each general contractor to go over the numbers.  Don’t be surprised by the range in which the bids come back.  Our bids ranged from 620K to as much as 820K.  All bids being way over our anticipated numbers.

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Welcome!

My blog is still under construction…we hope to launch soon!

This blog chronicles our own experience being the general contractor on our home remodel in the San Francisco Bay Area, where construction costs are one of the highest in the country.  I will be posting stories from the lessons we learned the hard way and offering products that I developed to help get us through the challenges we faced.

Thanks for visiting, please check back often!