What I Learned From My Contractor: In the beginning ….

Know anybody who has renovated their house? If you do, I’m sure you have heard an earful. Over budget, missed deadlines, incomplete work … the list goes on. If you have been the one renovating, you have probably come home from work wondering what possibly unwelcome surprise awaits you and spent sleepless nights wondering when it would finally be finished. Perhaps this is an exaggeration, but I would wager that 99% of the renovation stories I hear are negative.

So, I asked myself, why have I been so pleased with my experience?

I have spent the last 5 months renovating my house (aka, World Headquarters of Black Lab Advisory, LLC ) and started way before that planning and getting bids. We started later than expected, we spent more than planned … yet I would be hard pressed to say anything negative about the experience. Being who I am, this made me terribly curious. For weeks I observed every aspect of what was going on in my house until I figured it out. It was culture. My contractor, whom you will meet momentarily, established a culture via his operational and management philosophy, that made for a great experience. How he did that will be the subject of the next 10 posts. But before we get started, I’ll set the stage with a little background information.

The House: 1904 Victorian row in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, DC. Two levels, 2 bedrooms, 1.5 baths, English basement, street parking, no central A/C, sidewalk garden and small backyard with a deck (and lovely landscaping courtesy of Mr. Black Lab). Bought in 2001, completely renovated the kitchen in 2004 but, aside from smaller projects like the deck, new carpet, paint and refinishing the floors, the house hadn’t undergone a major overhaul since 1988.

The Project: Completely renovate the full bath – new walls and heated floor, tub/shower, add double sink vanity. Upgrade the electrical, install central A/C, upgrade the circa 1950′s Sears oil furnace to natural gas. Move washer and dryer from basement to top floor by building a new closet in the hallway upstairs. Replace drywall in wall and ceiling in two rooms because of a leaky roof; add a coat closet downstairs; replace front, back and interior doors. Plus a million other little things – you never know what you’ll find when you start taking down the plaster walls in a house that is more than 100 years old. Oh, and top it all off with a fresh coat of paint.

The Contractor: H3 Renovations, LLC is owned and operated by Carlos Herrera. Since 2000, H3 has been a residential and commercial general contractor of choice for everything from minor renovations to new construction in DC, Virginia and Maryland. Carlos is a genial entrepreneur who has lead more than one small business. He employs several professionals split into different crews for H3′s various client locations, but he always has the last say on any project.

The Client: Me, a business owner with a home office and someone used to HAVING clients, not being one. I started getting estimates in October 2008; I compared estimates ruthlessly and narrowed my options down to two by December. I then proceeded to pour over the estimates, ask a million questions and negotiate the final project so that we got most of what we wanted and were mostly within our budget. Once I settled on H3 it was early January 2009, so we waited for the Obama inauguration hubbub to subside and then turned our home over to Carlos.

Each of the next 10 posts will highlight what I learned from Carlos and his team at H3 about successfully managing a client relationship. There are no huge revelations here but, though these are simple ideas, I find they are still challenging to execute and, particularly, to execute consistently and in combination with each other. So, I hope this series is enlightening or at minimum entertaining. Even if it isn’t, take solace in the fact that it will be much, much shorter than the renovation itself.

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