How To Hire The Right Pro for Your Build or Construction Project
Deciding to engage a building pro to do construction on your old house is no small commitment. We’re usually talking in the range of a few thousand dollars to start, and can easily get up to tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.
When you’re making that huge of an investment, it’s important to start by knowing how to go about identifying:
The right industry or category of professional who can do the job.
The right skills or expertise that that professional brings, and
Whether your expectations align with the reality of what they are capable of providing.
Have you given thought to the reasons why you should hire out for your home renovation or remodel project?
How do you know if you're hiring the right professionals and assembling the team you need?
Read on to find out…
Construction is complex and highly specialized.
It would sure be nice if you could just go to a one-stop-shop, hire a contractor and be done with it. Unfortunately, that’s not how most home renovations work. Understanding the range of available options and aligning those with what you need, is key to a project’s success.
Watch the video above, where we first discuss whether you're making the right decision to hire out for your construction project.
Then we get into how you can figure out whether you are hiring the right professional.
Because one of the big mistakes that homeowners make is that once they decide they need to hire somebody for their project, they often reach out to the wrong professional.
So, if you actually need a licensed architect but unknowingly reached out to a designer or consultant, you could end up becoming very frustrated when they either can't do your job in its entirety, or your project gets postponed when you expend all this energy-- get bounced around-- before you figure out that you called the wrong professional to begin with.
Or if you're looking to hire a builder for your new house, but start it off with an unlicensed contractor you worked with before, then you might discover that that's not the right skillset for you.
So we're going to look a little bit into the reasons behind why you are hiring and delegating and outsourcing out the build of your project, and what you can do as a homeowner to be empowered in the process and make sure that you know your options and can actually hire the right professionals for the job.
But first, my YouTube channel Kickstart House is all about supporting the homeowner journey and navigating home renovations. If you find this topic valuable, be sure to subscribe and you'll be notified of all our videos.
Today’s topic is the third of a 3-part series, so you can always go back and watch the first two where we talk a bit about the Do-It-Yourself process versus hiring out, and whether DIY is the right decision for you or not.
Here in this post, we are focused on the hiring out part because we're assuming you've arrived at the fact that that is the right decision for you and your project.
Reason #1 to hire out for your project:
You just don't have the expertise to do it yourself.
Now, believe it or not, many homeowners don't recognize that. We are bombarded with images from television, magazines, social media, that make it seem so easy to work on our houses that we all feel like an expert because we all live in one. And yet construction is very complex.
Everything really does tie into each other and mistakes can get very costly.
So if you recognize that you don't have the expertise to do the project, nor do you have the capability, the will, the desire, the time to research and figure it out, then hiring is a great decision for you.
And by hiring out, I’m not just talking about the construction “build” portion of it.
The builders are simply the crew that executes a plan or design.
You may get a lot of value out of outsourcing your planning, design, approvals and permits, and sourcing to other parties.
Reason #2 to hire out for your project:
Do more, faster.
Another great reason to outsource your project to professionals is that you simply want to do more, faster. So if you're remodeling your kitchen and your bathroom and your life is going to be on hold while you don't have water or electricity and you need to move out of the house and rent temporary housing to get this done, then hiring a team or a crew makes a lot of sense. You can get so much more done when you have a crew working for you than if you were to do it yourself.
It's less of that intense disruption on your life, which allows you to spend your time doing the things that really matter to your life, your family, and your life's purpose.
Reason #3 to hire out for your project:
Your life is busy enough as it is.
And reason number three, why it would be a great decision for you to be the Boss of Construction instead of a Do-It-Yourselfer is that you simply have a really busy or hectic active life. If your plate's already full and you already have a bunch of obligations and responsibilities, the best use of your time, may not be to work on your house.
Even though you may be capable of it.
Even though you may enjoy it.
It just simply may not be the best use of your time.
So look at your project holistically in terms of your life, your purpose, where you want to be, how you want to spend your time, and what your values want to and if you've got other stuff going on, it's okay to say, " hey, in this season of my life, I'm going to hire out and delegate the project cuz even though I'm able perhaps to do it on my own and smart enough to be a weekend warrior. Do I really want to do that right now?"
And give yourself permission to hire someone.
That means that your effort now needs to go into how to be the boss of construction, how to be the matron/patron of construction.
And this gets to the second part of our topic today, which talks about how do you know whether you're hiring the right professional for your project and your life?
How do you know if you’re hiring the right professional for your renovation?
Now, to answer this question, we have to recognize that everybody's project is different. So there is not going to be one right solution for everyone.
So someone else's great contractor may not be a good contractor for you.
And a great contractor for you may not even be the next person's good contractor.
Knowing that everything is very individual, where you've got to approach this from a matchmaking or alignment point of view.
You need to know what your options are.
Have a big picture framework of how the renovation's going to go about, and then be able to make those high level decisions to design your process and build the team around your goals.
I've got something for you which may help. It’s called the Renovation Roadmap.
Could you use some more clarity on the renovation process? Download my Renovation Roadmap.
The Renovation Roadmap is specifically a framework I developed for homeowners to understand what the big decision milestones that they need to go through, in order to prioritize and hire a team and get their project built.
It's not the process that your professional's going to follow.
It's not the process for your designers or architects, contractors, or builders.
This is a process for you, the homeowner.
It's a process that's going to empower you to know how you're assembling the right team-- a team that you trust, and a team who can get your project done.
So do download it. It’ll be super quick, and I hope that's going to be a good resource for you.
Ready to make serious progress on your reno?
Hi, I’m Mona. An architect and renovation coach who’s on a mission to help everyday homeowners feel empowered in their build journeys.
Grab my free Renovation Roadmap to navigate any build project with confidence and clarity.
In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments, I would love to hear them. You can message me via any of my social links below, or by contacting me through this website.
I will see you next time on the Kickstart House YouTube channel for more tips and tools on how to navigate home improvement projects, remodels, renovations, and builds.