WILFMC #4: Pay Attention to the Small Things

What I Learned From My Contractor: A Series About the Client-Provider Relationship
Fourth in a series of 10. For background see the introduction.

Now is probably a good time to mention that I’m NOT getting anything from H3 Renovations for writing this series. That crown moulding in the living room that didn’t make it into the budget? Still not there, and probably won’t be for a while. I was simply perplexed with the dichotomy between my home renovation experience and the usually disastrous experience you hear about. Often overlooked, I think Carlos proves how important operational discipline is to managing a successful project with a happy client.

Now that’s out of the way ….

Part of installing central air conditioning was putting an air handler in our attic. For this to happen, we needed to cut a hole in the ceiling at the front of the house big enough to fit the air handler and convenient enough for maintenance. A side benefit of this was, for the first time, we would have access to our attic for storage because they would be installing a set of fold-down stairs. I cannot stress what a big deal this is. When you live in an urban area you make tradeoffs. I can walk or ride a bike to most anywhere I need to go on a daily basis, my “front yard” is a 2 square block park maintained by the National Park Service and I never have to sit in traffic for an hour just to get to and from work. In return, I find strange objects in my front garden, I collect parking tickets and the idea of storage space is a complete myth. That is to say, if the crew leader, Ricardo, cut a hole in the bedroom ceiling with a pair of dull scissors I would not have even noticed, I’d be so happy just to have the extra space.

Now you can understand why I was surprised to see the attic access and stairs redone not once, but twice. The first time had to do with the trim — I never actually saw what was wrong, I was so blinded by my eagerness I totally missed it. The second time the entire apparatus had to be removed and repositioned. At that point we actually discussed chucking the whole thing and starting over because of an issue with our existing ceiling (again, its an old house so you never know what you’ll find). Ultimately the second time was a charm and now all our suitcases, camping equipment and other assorted items that had once been in the scary basement were relocated to the new penthouse suite.

At the time, my only opinion about this process can be summarized in one word: hurry. We were near the end of the project and beyond the end of my patience with having the house in disarray. Having this task finished meant I would have some space to start putting things away and restoring order to my surroundings. Honest to goodness, I couldn’t see what was wrong and was probably ready to overlook anything in order to mark this task as finished. But Carlos was insistent. They were small things — a seam in the trim, a narrow gap in the access door — but he wanted them fixed. And he was absolutely right. Now that been a couple of months, I know those little things would have driven me crazy. As part of the first phase of the project, I had all the mouldings and door & window casings changed so that they matched because the fact that they didn’t was my #1 pet peeve. Yep, it was on the list above “no central air conditioning”. So though the issues with the attic were small things, getting them right made a big difference.

Up next: Be upfront with your opinions.

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