How to Choose a Carpenter for a Home Remodel

Most advice on this subject is a list of things you cannot check. Here is what you can actually verify before somebody starts opening up your walls.

Work out what you are hiring first

This causes more trouble than anything else. A carpenter does the framing, the openings, the structure and the finish work. A general contractor runs multiple trades and takes responsibility for the schedule. They are different jobs and they cost differently.

If your project needs five trades sequenced over three months, you want a GC. If it is carpentry with a plumber and an electrician around it, a carpenter who coordinates with those trades is cheaper and usually faster. Ask directly which one somebody is, and be wary of anyone who says they are both.

What a real quote looks like

It is written down. It says what is included and what is not. And on remodel work it distinguishes between what can be seen and what cannot.

That last part matters more in old houses than anywhere. Nobody can price what is behind a wall before it is open, so an honest quote gives you a firm number for the visible scope and a clear range for the unknown, with an agreement that you get told before anything moves. A single confident number covering everything is not more reliable — it is either padded or it is going to change.

Questions worth asking

• Have you worked on houses this age? A crew used to subdivisions will quote an older house wrong, because the assumptions are different — settled framing, plaster, non-standard openings, things done twice before.
• Who is actually on site? Whether the person quoting is the person working matters, particularly on finish work.
• What are you not doing? Drywall, paint, permits, disposal. Every gap here becomes a cost or a delay later.
• How do you handle permits? Around here, Mingo and Logan counties administer permitting separately, and the same job can carry different requirements either side of the line. Somebody who has never thought about it is telling you something.
• What is the payment schedule? A deposit for materials is normal. A large payment up front before anything starts is not.

Warning signs

Some of these are obvious and some are not:

• A quote given without seeing the job.
• Pressure to decide today, or a price that drops sharply when you hesitate.
• Cash-only, or a large up-front payment.
• Vagueness about what is included, especially finishing.
• No interest in what is behind the wall.
• Agreement with everything you suggest. Somebody who has done this before should occasionally tell you that what you are asking for is a bad idea.

The thing most people forget to check

Ask how they handle the end of the job. Almost every remodel finishes with a list of small items — a door that needs adjusting, a joint to refill, trim that was left off. Those lists are where a good job turns into a nearly-good one, because nobody wants to drive back out for half a day of odd items.

Somebody who brings that up before you do has finished jobs properly before.

Distance is a real factor in a small market

Around here it is worth asking where somebody is based, not because local is automatically better but because it changes the economics of the small stuff. A crew an hour away has no commercial reason to come back for a two-hour job, so those jobs do not happen. Someone twenty minutes out will.

It also affects scheduling. If the plumber runs late and a day gets lost, a nearby crew can pick it back up in a way a distant one cannot.

What we would tell you about us

We are carpenters rather than a general contractor, and on a project needing five trades run for three months we will say so at the visit rather than three weeks in. What we do is the framing, the openings, the structure and the finish work, with licensed trades handling plumbing and electrical around our schedule.

The remodeling carpentry page sets out exactly where our work starts and stops, which is the thing worth checking before you hire anybody — us included.