Replies

1. 
   Luka | May 16, 2008 04:19am | #1

   I don't do the 'account' and 'sign in' thing at NYT.

   And no, I'm not going to even bother with a bugmenot sign in. (They delete those constantly, anyway.)

   It's a newspaper fer cripe's sake.

   They should show the articles without all the hassle, just like other newspapers do.

   Until they do, I will not be able to read the articles.

   
   Politics: the blind insulting the blind.

   Click here for access to the Woodshed Tavern

1. 
   dovetail97128 | May 16, 2008 04:31am | #2

   I got into read it with no problem . Great read, should be a part of every contractors handouts to owners IMO.
   They can't get your Goat if you don't tell them where it is hidden.

2. 
   BUIC | May 16, 2008 04:37am | #3

    Here you go, read, read my friend...

    

   ADMIT it: You do not regard contractors as sensitive creatures. There are times you are not even sure they are quite human. They track all that dirt into your house. They seem unable to clean up after themselves after a day’s work. They are unaware that you have a life, a schedule.

   But think about it: Has not a contractor an eye, perhaps one better equipped to judge a grain of wood than your own? Has not a contractor hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you prick a contractor does he not bleed, hopefully not on the white marble counter? If you do not pay him, will he not avenge himself, perhaps ripping out the plumbing? In short, has not a contractor feelings?

   If you doubt it, listen to the story of Rich Gaspar, the president of Gaspar’s Construction in Seattle, who suffered such feelings of rage, frustration and pain from what he calls a client from the dark side that he sought therapy. The job, some six years ago, was large, building a mother-in-law apartment in a basement; Mr. Gaspar describes the homeowner as a corporate hatchet man. Meeting him, Mr. Gaspar sensed he would be difficult. A month into the renovation, which was plagued with unforeseen construction problems and would climb from a $250,000 estimate to a cost of $350,000, Mr. Gaspar was certain of it.

   “What he said over and over was: ‘This confirms my suspicions about you’ — in other words, you are a crook,” Mr. Gaspar says. “The houses we are working on are 110 years old, they have asbestos and lead, and when you run into those situations you have to deal with it. He’d come back and say, ‘You always intended to charge me more. I knew this was going to be a half-million job.’ I went to therapy because he was negative, belligerent and demeaning.”

   What kind of advice did the shrink have?

   “We’d talk about my feelings, how I could better take care of myself. There were things like write a letter, then tear it up and put it in a drawer. It was a sounding board, a place for me to release the stuff coming down on me. Conflict is hard enough for me.”

   Much has been written about contractors from hell. There is a Web site of that very name filled with horror stories and legal resources. Another site, Angie’s List, permits homeowners to rate their contractors, who are given the opportunity to reply. Comparatively little attention is paid to the homeowner from hell, to the unreasonable, irrational and selfish demands that make contractors crazy. Although the recession is making it easier to hire contractors in some parts of the country and the power in the relationship might seem to be shifting to the homeowner, it should be remembered that contractors, too, have limits.

   John Finton is the founder of Finton Construction, a Los Angeles firm that has about 30 luxury projects under construction at a time, with C.E.O.’s and entertainment superstars for clients.

   “Oh — a human punching bag,” commented a woman who was building a vacation house in Mexico when he told her what he did, and Mr. Finton did not disagree. The homes he builds are between 5,000 and 50,000 square feet. The people he builds them for, “the kings and queens of society,” want what they want when they want it, he says, and don’t stand in line for anything. Mr. Finton, who calls himself a “pathological accommodator,” is for the most part fine with that. For many years, he slept with his cellphone next to his bed. He is unruffled by those who show up an hour or two late.

   But occasionally a client goes too far.

   There was, for instance, the female pop singer who requested an evening meeting during the time Mr. Finton’s mother was terminally ill with cancer, about six years ago. It was Mr. Finton’s birthday, and his mother had planned a special dinner. Mr. Finton explained this to the singer’s father, who acted as her on-site representative. A short time later, Mr. Finton got a call: The singer, he was told, would see him that evening. Mr. Finton complied.

   On another occasion, Mr. Finton had a cancer scare of his own. A movie executive for whom he was building a large home immediately sent over a limo to take him to the cancer hospital, the City of Hope. The lump on his chest turned out to be benign. Mr. Finton was less certain about his client.

   “He’d said, ‘I need you healthy so I can kick you around,’ ” Mr. Finton remembers. “I think he was somewhat serious.”

   There does not appear to be a builder’s equivalent of Angie’s List aimed at exposing difficult homeowners. But contractors seem to have their own ways of rating, handling and rejecting those clients. There is even a book on the subject: “Managing the Emotional Homeowner: The Remodeler’s Guide to Happy Customers,” written by David Lupberger, a Colorado contractor turned consultant, and Bill Still. (The book is available at Mr. Lupberger’s Web site, turnkeyprogram.com, for $29.95.) Topics include “Managing Homeowner Expectations” and “The Zen Approach to Handling Homeowner Upsets.” (Abridged version: just let the waves of rage wash over you and eventually the client will become exhausted.) If it sounds as if there was a good deal of psychiatric input, it’s because there was. Two psychologists, a man and a woman, had asked, through a friend, to meet him.

   “They had both done renovations the previous year and both were still upset, and so for the next hour they vented. Cost overruns, delays in the construction. I’ll never forget him shaking a finger at me and saying, ‘David, it’s been over a year. Do you see how upset I still am?’ ”

   Mr. Lupberger learned a few things. “He said there is something called parental transference that can take place in a large remodeling project; the contractor takes on the parenting role due to the dependency that can happen,” Mr. Lupberger says. “If someone had a bad parenting experience growing up and then the contractor upset the homeowner by not meeting an expectation or missing a deadline, all the negative emotion from that person’s childhood is transferred to the contractor.”

   One instructive chart in Mr. Lupberger’s book is “The Homeowner’s Emotional Roller Coaster,” which illustrates the intense highs and lows a client can expect during a renovation. Dan Bawden, who runs Legal Eagle Contractors in Houston and is both a lawyer and a contractor, found the book invaluable and has taken that chart a step further. His interpretation, “Dan’s Funk Chart,” expands the list of players to include architect, family dog and children, all of whom ride a roller coaster of emotional states, from Deep Funk to Bliss. The chart is on Mr. Bawden’s Web site (legaleaglecontractors.com), which makes it easy to follow along as he explains.

   “Look at the family dog,” Mr. Bawden says. “When construction starts he hides so far away he goes off the bottom of the chart. He doesn’t come back until the party to catch the falling hors d’oeuvres. Look at the children when the rough framing comes in, bouncing around, happy because they have a jungle gym to play on. The homeowner is super-happy at the beginning, then when the bids come in the homeowner and the architect both drop into a deep funk. The architect is down there because he told them it was going to cost half the amount so his creation could be built, and the homeowners are there because they know he was lying.”

   Trying to prepare homeowners for the stress of renovation does not always work, Mr. Bawden says; women in their third trimester of pregnancy, for example, can be “insanely picky.”

   “They’ll bend over as best they can and look at the underside of the countertop in the kitchen, and they’ll see it wasn’t painted and they will just explode,” he says.

   Mr. Bawden, a married man, always gives pregnant women slack. But he does screen clients; if they seem flaky at the first interview, he asks them to take a 10-question personality test. (On his site, this test is labeled “Just for Fun,” which shows how sneaky some contractors can be.)

   “It puts you in one of five categories,” Mr. Bawden says. “If you are in the middle you are an ideal candidate. If you’re at one extreme, you are someone so anal and picky that you are going to be unpleasable; if you’re at the other, you are so artistic and flaky you couldn’t pick a paint color if your life depended on it.” Either way, he adds, “you’re going to get a real careful second interview.”

   CLIENT screening turns out to be a common practice. Experienced contractors learn to become alert to potentially destructive patterns: homeowners who belittle the work of respected colleagues, say, or brag about beating down tradespeople to get the best price.

   Herbert Stanwood, a senior project designer for the nationwide firm of Case Design/Remodeling, who works at the headquarters in Bethesda, Md., has a list of difficult client types. They include the Carrot Dangler, who boasts of his influence in the neighborhood and suggests the contractor will get more work if he lowers his price, and the Relationship Killer, who announces at the first meeting that he or she will be difficult. That’s a major red flag because the client has taken a belligerent stance before the project has even begun.

   Mr. Stanwood has also encountered the Contract Rewriter. One such client tried to add a clause that said the contractor would be liable for damage “to any property on the site or adjacent sites, including trees, shrubs, lawns, lots, pavements or roadway,” Mr. Stanwood says. “So I guess if we’re driving down the street and we see a shrub that somebody’s run into, we’re responsible.”

   Once a job is under way, the problem that most seems to trouble contractors is client indecision.

   “The contractor can’t proceed without certain information,” says Sal Alfano, the editorial director of a half-dozen magazines for contractors at Hanley Wood Business Media and a former contractor himself. “If I don’t know what the floor finishing is going to be — if it’s going to be three-quarter-inch hardwood or a layer of plywood and half-inch tile, which would make it more like an inch and a quarter — there’s a lot of work I can’t do. I can’t hang the doors, I can’t even plan what the stair structure is going to be like. If I’m a half-inch off on the height of the first tread because you decided to go with thicker or thinner flooring, you’re going to fall on your face.”

   Contractors also have problems with clients who buy materials themselves in an attempt to save money, then expect their contractor to deal with any problems that result; clients who constantly challenge their expertise; clients who call them on weekends or evenings about problems that can wait until a workday.

   Sometimes the problems are not even the responsibility of the contractor. Mr. Finton, the luxury builder in Los Angeles, remembers getting one such call as he was sitting down to Easter dinner.

   “A lot of my clientele, although they may be brilliant in terms of their own business, when it comes to fixing a clogged toilet — and most people would pick up the Yellow Pages — they have one number, and they call me,” Mr. Finton says. “I had a client who called me because his home had caught on fire. It had nothing to do with anything we had done; his wife had lit some candles and the drapes closed automatically and caught on fire. He said, ‘The house is on fire.’ I said, Call the fire department.”

   “I did go out there anyway,” he adds.

   Getting paid can be another issue.

   “I’ve had people send me an interpretation of the bill and pay me that,” said Kip Siebert, who runs Heritage Home Design in Montclair, N.J. “I send them a bill, they send me back another one that tells me what I really should be charging.”

   There are also those clients who find fault with the work to delay or withhold a final payment, knowing that it may be so expensive for the contractor to sue that he will write off the loss. Lonny Rutherford, who runs Legacy Construction, a three-person firm in New Mexico, had a client who withheld a final payment of $10,000 because a knob from a kitchen cabinet was missing.

   “It was a custom order — sometimes when you order knobs, the screw holes aren’t right,” Mr. Rutherford says. “We re-ordered and got the knob within three weeks, but it was a killer.” Later, “we added a clause that says final payment is due upon substantial completion, when you can occupy the job and use it. You can still cook without a knob.”

   Bob Hanbury and his brother Alan, third-generation contractors who run the House of Hanbury Builders in Newington, Conn., have also made changes to their contract. It now has 21 amendments, including the dog-and-child clause and the toilet clause. Each, Mr. Hanbury says, has a story.

   “This dog was in a pen. We delivered some stuff and leaned it against the fence, the door opened, the dog wandered off. But that wasn’t a good enough explanation for the homeowner. It became a personal attack: ‘Don’t you care anything about my dog? Are you stupid?’ I said, It’s an animal; it will come back. She said — how did she put it? — ‘Don’t you think I care about this dog as much as a child? You could have lost my child.’ I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there. The dog came back in the middle of the argument.”

   The dog clause now says that workers “shall not be expected to keep gates and the like closed for animals and children.”

   And the toilet clause?

   “We did an addition. Most people say if you would like to use the bathroom, come on in. The homeowner suddenly says, ‘You can’t use my bathroom’ — she had this brand-new remodeled bathroom. I said, Let’s pull out of this job, but it was my brother’s job. We had to go down to the gas station. Now it says — I’m paraphrasing — If you don’t let us use your bathroom, we’re going to charge you for a Porta-Potty and we’re going to put it in the front yard.”

   That reminds Mr. Hanbury of another clause.

   “The same woman wanted us to reimburse her for the electricity and the water we used. We now say water and other utilities shall be furnished by owner at no expense to contractor. That little old lady drove my brother crazy.”

   And Mr. Finton, builder to C.E.O.’s and stars? Six years after that singer demanded he skip the birthday dinner his dying mother planned for him, he has set boundaries. He would no longer agree to such a meeting. And he now sleeps with his phone in another room. He tries to protect his weekend and family time. If someone calls when he’s taking his children to school, he will not answer his cell — though sometimes he texts.<!----><!---->

1. 
   Luka | May 16, 2008 04:42am | #6

   Thank you BUIC.FWIW: I'm sure NYT is just rolling in chagrin, due to the fact that I refuse to sign in just to read their articles.;o)

   
   Politics: the blind insulting the blind.

   Click here for access to the Woodshed Tavern

3. 
   DanT | May 16, 2008 04:40am | #4

   It opened right up for me too.  Good read.  Sorry you missed it.  DanT

4. 
   seb | May 16, 2008 04:40am | #5

   I don't either, but this one was readable without all that stuff..just clicked and read.. odd..
   Bud

5. 
   Zano | May 16, 2008 02:11pm | #9

   It opens right up..the NYT is for free now on the internet. It even mentioned the editor of FHB.

1. 
   Piffin | May 16, 2008 03:08pm | #12

   Not so here 

    

   Welcome to the Taunton University of Knowledge FHB Campus at Breaktime. where ... Excellence is its own reward!

2. 
   Luka | May 16, 2008 07:21pm | #13

   Still demanding that I sign up or log in, here...

   
   Politics: the blind insulting the blind.

   Click here for access to the Woodshed Tavern

1. 
   MarkH | May 18, 2008 04:52pm | #18

   Worked for me. I bet they are pissd at you for bad mouthing their signup scheme. Probably made a lot of money selling email addys, now their easy money days are over.

1. 
   jesse | May 18, 2008 07:47pm | #19

   nytimes.com has been sign-in free for like 8 months now. And everything is there for free, the online subscriptions don't exist anymore.

2. 
   Luka | May 18, 2008 08:38pm | #20

   So you guys keep saying.But every time I follow a link from here to the NYT... I get the screen that says I have to signup or login.I even tried emptying my cache and cookies.

   Either they have figured out some other scheme to data farm folks like yourself, and I have somehow managed to block that new scheme...Or MarkH is right.;o)Or...I'm thinking it's the fact that I do not accept any cookies from them.Have you ever actually looked at what is in their cookies ?Tracking cookies. They have information about your computer, (Stuff that, if you have registered your software, and/or your hardware components... -can- be used to find whatever personal information you used to register. Phone, address, etc...), your browser, the time and date you are visiting, the page you are visiting, where you came from, (ie, the specific thread here at taunton.com, that the link that you clicked, was in...). And more. The tracking cookie that they leave on your computer, after you leave their site, does not contain quite as much info as what they put on your computer, only for the duration of your visit.Who needs registration, when you can get all that, simply by exploiting people's browsers, and their desire to not be bothered to practice safe hex.NYT apparently blocks the person who blocks their cookies.That still puts them behind the other newpaper sites. Because the other sites have discovered that you don't have to farm all that data through cookie software.Most other sites will let you in, even if you deny cookies... because they still farm all that data through some sort of tracking metrics, and embed the info in a one pixel by one pixel "image" they put on the screen somewhere.If you have foxfire or similar mozilla browser, get "adblock plus". Use it to have a look at the pages you visit.You'll find the image they used, to do all that with. (You'll see a bunch of the tracking information in the "properties" line, associated with what is usually a .gif file.) You can block that, with adblock plus.

   
   Politics: the blind insulting the blind.

   Click here for access to the Woodshed Tavern

3. 
   Huntdoctor | May 18, 2008 09:24pm | #21

   Luka,

   Is there black helicopters buzzing over your house?

   Russell

   "Welcome to my World"

4. 
   Luka | May 18, 2008 09:44pm | #22

   If there were, they would be rescue helicopters.Kayakers try their luck with this river all the time, and lose. We get rescue helicopters out here on a regular basis.To address your actual point:Why is it necessary to equate paranoia with being aware of your surroundings ?So, I am more aware of what goes on behind the screen when you are online, than most people are. That neccesarily makes me paranoid ?I think you were just joking. But just in case... Methinks anyone who makes that assumption automatically, has problems of thier own...

   
   Politics: the blind insulting the blind.

   Click here for access to the Woodshed Tavern

5. 
   jesse | May 19, 2008 07:27pm | #23

   Oh, as a kayaker, now you just pushed my button. I am hugely suspicious of your claim that you hear rescue choppers for kayakers "all the time." What river do you live next to, and how often can you actually confirm there have been kayaker rescues?

6. 
   rez | May 19, 2008 08:06pm | #24

   Ladies and Gentlemen...start yer engines!

    

   be a Roar! be a snorK* be an award winner!

   Congratulations!

   sumfolk receive the

   'The Award'.

   Saaalute!View ImageView Image 

    

    

   be the. 

   
7. 
   Luka | May 19, 2008 08:51pm | #25

   Depends on your definition of "all the time". LOL "All the time", being, in the first place, one of those subjective type statements we all make.Dinosaur works at a ski resort. He is on the rescue team. I'm positive his definition of "all the time" differs greatly from mine.;o)I live on the south fork of the skykomish river.About an 1/8th of a mile above sunset falls.Between this falls, and the one above here, there is a death every few years, from kayakers trying the falls.And during the summer months, it is not unusual to hear rescue helicopters every other week. Sometimes, several times in a week.Coming out here, after living in the big city for most of my life before that, and maybe being aware of three rescue helicopters overhead in all that time... This pretty much seems like "all the time" to me.;o)

   
   Politics: the blind insulting the blind.

   Click here for access to the Woodshed Tavern

8. 
   john7g | May 19, 2008 10:04pm | #27

   Wow.  I've driven right by your place, so-to-speak.  I had a temp assignment at Boeing the summer of '00 and drove out that way to explore.  Bushwacked my way to the top of Index.  ever see the North side of Index (IIRC there was a wide trail to a lake for fishing and climbing )? Pretty neat place.

9. 
   Luka | May 19, 2008 10:21pm | #28

   If you drove to that "wide trail to a lake for fishing and climbing". then you were within two miles of where I live.I live on the north side of a foothill to the north side of Mount Index.

   
   Politics: the blind insulting the blind.

   Click here for access to the Woodshed Tavern

10. 
    Luka | May 19, 2008 08:56pm | #26

    Oh, and by the way...The deaths I am aware of, were kayakers, trying the falls.I am sure that not all of those rescue helicopters were for kayakers. Some could have been swimmers. Or hikers. Or climbers. They have all that, all around here.But the kayakers are the first that come to mind when I hear the rescue helicopters. Because of the deaths.When you hear firetrucks, is a fair balance of the types of fires they -might- be resoponding to, the first thing that comes to your mind ? Or do you remember the fires that you have been aware of ?

    
    Politics: the blind insulting the blind.

    Click here for access to the Woodshed Tavern

6. 
   Piffin | May 16, 2008 02:48pm | #11

   Same here, but I don't let it build my rage 

    

   Welcome to the Taunton University of Knowledge FHB Campus at Breaktime. where ... Excellence is its own reward!

1. 
   Luka | May 16, 2008 07:24pm | #14

   No rage here either.Good play on words, there.=0)I don't let this kind of stuff anger me. I think my words come across stronger than the reality is.In reality, it's pretty much, "oh well, even though they write stuff that they wish people would read... if they don't want me to read it, no skin off my nose..."Plenty otherwise, on the net, to read.

   
   Politics: the blind insulting the blind.

   Click here for access to the Woodshed Tavern

1. 
   Sphere | May 16, 2008 07:49pm | #15

   "Plenty otherwise, on the net, to read."

   And pictures TOO!  I hear the internets is better than Playboy.Spheramid Enterprises Architectural Woodworks

   Click away from here

   Do not click here what ever ya do

   Bad things happen to those who click themselves

2. 
   Matt | May 16, 2008 05:04am | #7

   Hot button!!!

   OK, so I didn't read the whole article... BUT - as a new home builder here is what I see - supposed home buyer comes in and wants to buy a spec house.. $1500 deposit and wants $4k in upgrades to be added to the house.  RE agents gladly signs them up.  "HB" acts totally irresponsible as far as getting things sealed up with the mortgage company... Ends up not getting the loan and builder gets stuck with the $4k in upgrades.... So, now when I say " sorry I need a loan commitment letter or else I can't add those upgrades to the house"  - supposed homebuyer looks stupified....

1. 
   fingersandtoes | May 16, 2008 10:59am | #8

   Exactly.

   I sold a side-by-side duplex. The weekend before completion I drove by and saw both front doors open, so I stopped to chat to the two women drinking beer on the back porch. I asked them who let them in, and pointed out that they didn't own the place yet. They replied that the real estate agent had given them the keys, and their husbands, who were using a power auger to set fence posts, chimed in that "it was  pretty much a done deal". I suggested I wasn't all that happy to see them working on a property they didn't own and had no insurance on. They were still rolling their eyes when I pointed out that it wasn't coincidence that they were digging up so many rock of the same size - they were augering right through their septic field runs.

   It's not yours, and you can't change it until you pay for it.

1. 
   Matt | May 16, 2008 02:26pm | #10

   If it's a done deal then I guess the punchlist is done too... :-)

3. 
   Biff_Loman | May 16, 2008 07:59pm | #16

   Oh man. . . how true.

   After I started working in remodeling, I'm a lot more willing to cut some slack for other professionals, and to accept how much things cost.

   An excavations contractor (who I knew) gave me an estimate to dig up my driveway that was twice as much as my WAG.  Not good news, but I sucked it up and told him I'd have to wait a month or two.  Got to get it done right. 

1. 
   Matt | May 18, 2008 02:46pm | #17

   >>  After I started working in remodeling, I'm a lot more willing to cut some slack for other professionals, and to accept how much things cost. <<

   I hope about 100,000 people read that...