Meet a Contractor Who Did Everything Right

“How’s the renovation going?” was the usual refrain from my co-workers and friends, who knew we were on an eight-week construction schedule.

“Just great,” I told a friend in San Diego at the end of the first week, when the foundation had been poured and the new room framed.

“Just wait,” said the friend. “Something always goes wrong. My sister added on to her house, and she went $300,000 over budget. She finally had to quit her job to stem the damage.”

“Terrific,” I told another woman who was in the middle of renovating her San Jose home, which she referred to as the Money Pit.

“Just wait,” she said, “It got so bad around here when they were sandblasting the ceilings that I had to escape with the baby to a motel for a couple of nights.”

“Just wait,” said everybody else who asked me, seeming to sneer in unison at my naivete, “Something always goes wrong.”

No one wanted to believe that this was a contractor-client relationship that wouldn’t turn into a horror story.

We decided to add on to our two-bedroom, 1,260-square-foot house in south Van Nuys after backing out of buying a 2,000-square-foot home in Sherman Oaks. Moving would have meant twice the property taxes, probably another $10,000 just to make the Sherman Oaks house livable and almost double our present mortgage.

So we joined the remodeling trend that seemed to be sweeping our neighborhood of 40-year-old homes. Adding on would give us the space we wanted, so we braced ourselves for a bad experience--that was part of the deal, right?

We almost lost faith in contractors before we began. From a dozen contacted, all found through friends and friends of friends, we could only get one guy to actually show up to look at the blueprints, and he was everything we’d been told a contractor would be--arrogant and unreliable.

He was hostile about the architect’s blueprints, but promised to have a bid for us in a week. When I called after two weeks, he nearly hissed with resentment, but said he’d have the plans for us in another week. We never heard from him again.

We came up with our contractor’s name from an unlikely source, a neighbor down the street whom we had met once and to whom we had mentioned that we were having trouble finding a contractor. “Meet this guy,” our neighbor said, “You will want to hire him.”

My husband left a message on the contractor’s answering machine, and he returned the call the very next night. That was one good sign.

As my husband, Steve, conversed with him that first time, he flashed me the OK sign. He told Paul about the problems we were having communicating with contractors before we even hired anyone.

Paul said, “People are always having problems with their contractors, so I try to stress the service.” He genuinely seemed to mean it.

We hired Paul on the spot, minutes after he and his partner, Dan, presented their bid, three days after they first toured our home--and we didn’t have a comparison bid.

Before the pair showed up four minutes early on that Thursday morning in March, my husband and I nervously made bets with each other on what the bid would be. (The loser got to be in charge of the remodel).

A bid of $40,870 (slightly more than we expected) was their proposed amount to add on a 12-by-17-foot family room, convert a den into a master bedroom, completely renovate and enlarge a second bathroom and add a deck.

Paul assured us it was a realistic amount. The figure did go up, almost $5,000, but $1,400 of that was upgrading the tub to a Jacuzzi, another $1,000 was for electrical costs that weren’t noted on the architect’s plans, and the rest was for the $100-to-$500 decisions that just add up.

Things went so smoothly--subcontractors showed up, work was generally ahead of schedule--my husband and I still found something to worry about--keeping up with our contractor. When we couldn’t decide between seven tile designs for the bathroom, Paul and Dan helped us settle on three tiles in a matter of minutes.

Paul marveled at our ability to make quick decisions, which we attributed to the business we’re both in--newspapers--and the training to meet deadlines.

Every time I told somebody about the fun we were having redoing our house and how much we liked our contractor, they responded with, “I have never heard of anybody who ever liked their contractor,” or “Every single person I know who has remodeled ends up firing their contractor,” and finally, with “You should write a story about it.”

So before Paul and Dan left, I told them I was going to write a story about a project that went right, a contractor who wasn’t an ogre.

“That would be so great, a contractor’s dream,” Paul said, “But don’t forget to give yourselves some credit.”

“For what?” I asked. “Not caring?” They laughed, but I was alluding to the small decisions we deferred to them, such as the molding for the family room (“Just pick something modern and simple; don’t make us think about molding,” we said) or the glass block (“Just pick out the basic one that everybody knows.”)

We looked forward to Paul and Dan arriving at 8 every morning--a decent hour--so we could admire yesterday’s handiwork because they were usually gone when we got home. That’s another reason the project went well--we weren’t around to endure the endless sawing and hammering; we just heard all about it from Kate, our baby sitter, who started the same day the construction did.

Living through the remodel was part of the deal we struck with Kate, and she developed her own strategy for survival, which became long walks around the neighborhood and half-day trips to the park with our then 14-month-old daughter, Gillian.

We quickly developed a rapport with Paul, the team manager and cheerleader, and Dan, the master of precision, who glanced at a drawing of a floor-to-ceiling bookcase on our home computer one morning, then reproduced it life-size the next day in the new den.

By the end of the first week, Paul and I were standing in the shell of the old bathroom, trying to decide where to move the toilet because it wouldn’t fit in the corner where the architect had drawn it.

We were reluctant to move it to the center of the room until Paul suggested adding a low glass-block wall to the left of the toilet, which would act as high-tech camouflage. Paul picked up on the glass block that was already part of the bathroom design, a 10-block terraced window in the shower.

Paul and Dan, both in their late 30s, were full of better ideas, constantly fine-tuning the design, bringing the modest project to a higher level.

“What kind of door are you going to put on the bathroom?” Paul asked. We didn’t know. A door’s a door, right? Paul campaigned for a door with personality--a single-panel French door with opaque frosted glass that would still provide privacy.

The small design touches seemed to inspire Paul, who had been enthusiastic from the first time he walked through the house--he liked our ideas, from the tongue-and-groove ceiling in the den, to the modern single-panel French doors, to the deck that would wrap around the pool. That’s another reason we hired him. He made us feel like we knew what we were doing.

The last week of the project, which, yes, finished on deadline, we stood around reminiscing with Paul and Dan--about the remodel, but also about trips to Europe, basketball games and kids. It felt like the last day of school, when you craved the freedom of summer, yet knew you’d miss your friends.

Our daughter was cranky that morning, and Dan said, “She sounds tired.”

“I guess you know you’ve been on a project long enough,” I said to Dan, “when you know the baby’s nap schedule.”

READERS WELCOME TO SHARE THEIR REMODELING TALES Readers wishing to share their remodeling experiences should send queries or manuscripts to Real Estate Editor, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053.