Costs & Hiring

I have stood in enough Wooster Square front gardens while an owner explains what the last contractor told them to have developed a short list of questions. None of them is technical enough to be unfair, and the answers sort people quickly. The five questions “What is causing this?” Not what will you do, what […]

The most useful thing an East Rock client ever handed me was a manila folder. Inside were dated photographs of a wall going back to 1997, receipts, and a page of handwritten notes about which contractor did what. It turned a diagnosis that would have taken a day of investigation into a twenty-minute conversation. Why

An owner on Prospect Hill could not understand why repointing her rear elevation cost more than the front, when the front was twice the area. The front was flat, at the sidewalk, reachable from a light scaffold. The rear was three stories over a sloping garden with a conservatory in the way. The trowel work

Three quotes on a Fair Haven chimney: $2,400, $6,800 and $11,500. The owner assumed the middle one was the safe choice. In fact the cheap one was a partial repoint of the visible face, the expensive one included rebuilding the top eight courses and a new liner, and the middle one was somewhere in between

Part of my old job was reading contractor proposals submitted with applications for work in the Wooster Square district. The good ones ran two or three pages. The bad ones were a line of text and a number, and about half of those turned into change orders or complaints before the job finished. The seven

An East Rock buyer sent me photos of a house whose listing said the brickwork had been “fully repointed last year.” The joints in the photo were flush, uniform, slightly glossy, and ran across the face of several bricks. That is not repointing. That is a skim coat, and it costs about a fifth as