When the Contractor Becomes the Customer

I’ve built and remodeled a lot of homes over the years, but there’s something a little

different about building an addition onto your own house.

Especially when your wife is the customer.

Technically, I suppose I’m the homeowner too. But let’s be realistic here. Darla is the

customer. Our new front entrance addition isn’t a huge project. You would think that

would make it fairly simple. After all, I do this for a living.

The “Ten Minute Discussion” - That was my first mistake.

One thing this project has already reminded me is that the size of a project has

absolutely nothing to do with the number of decisions involved. Take the windows and

doors. I already had a plan. I knew of some good-quality products that I’ve used before.

They were reasonably priced, fairly easy to install, and the lead times were decent.

In my contractor brain, this was basically a done deal.

I thought: “I’ll show Darla these windows and doors, she’ll see the wisdom of my

recommendation, and in about ten minutes we’ll be on our way.” So I took her to one of

our local big-box stores.

I thought, “This will take ten minutes.” That was adorable I considered that to be

realistic.

I started explaining things like cost, value, installation, quality, lead times, and all the

other practical considerations that contractors spend their days thinking about.

Meanwhile, Darla was looking at completely different things.

“What color does this come in?”

“Will this interfere with my potted plants?”

“Will that window look right with the logs?”

“Is that really the size you were thinking?”

Suddenly, I realized I had made a serious tactical error. I should have taken my own

Advice. The funny part is that I give husbands this exact warning all the time. When I’m

working with a married couple and the husband and I are standing there discussing

some construction detail, I’ve been known to say: “Sir, I hate to tell you this, but you and

I both know your wife is going to have the final say.”

Usually, he laughs. I laugh. His wife laughs.

Apparently, somewhere along the way, I forgot that this rule also applies to contractors.

Especially contractors who have been married nearly forty years. You would think that

after all those years I would know better.

Two Different Ways of Seeing the Same Project

I had mistakenly assumed that Darla would look at the project through my contractor

eyes.

I was thinking:

“Is it a good product?”

“Is it a good value?”

“Can we get it in a reasonable amount of time?”

“Can I install it without turning this little addition into a six-month engineering project?”

Darla was thinking:

“How will this look?”

“How will it feel?”

“Will the color work with the house?”

“Will I still be able to put plants where I want them?”

And, of course, one very important question:

“Why can’t the window be bigger?”

That question has now been discussed more than once. Here’s the thing: neither way of

looking at the project is wrong. That may be the biggest reminder this addition has given

me so far. A contractor naturally sees structure, cost, installation, durability,

scheduling, weatherproofing, and lead times. A homeowner sees the place where

they are going to live every day. They notice how the light comes through a window.

They care about color contrast. They think about where the furniture goes, where the

plants go, how the room feels when you walk into it, and whether the whole thing

actually looks like it belongs on the house.

Contractors – We Have to Listen

As contractors, we sometimes have an answer before the homeowner has even

finished asking the question. And sometimes we need to remember that our job isn’t

simply to tell someone what will work. Our job is to help them figure out what will work

for them.

Apparently, that includes our wives.

So where does that leave the Haseltine front entrance addition?

Well, somewhere between:

“I thought I had this all figured out.”

and

“We are still discussing windows.”

Which brings me to another contractor phrase that I now get to use on myself: There

may be a slight delay due to unfinished decisions.

And Then There’s the Log House

Just to make things more interesting, there is one more character in this story - The

house.

If you’ve ever built an addition onto a conventional stick-built home, things are generally

straight, square, level, and reasonably predictable. We don’t own one of those. We own

a hand-scribed log home.

Beautiful? Absolutely.

Uniform? Not even remotely.

Trying to attach a new, square addition to a hand-scribed log structure introduces a

whole new category of interesting problems. Logs move. Logs taper. Logs are not

perfectly straight. And apparently, neither is this project.

The Reminder

For now, I’ve already been reminded of something important. At Jeff’s Good Works, we

work on houses every day. Our customers don’t. To us, it may be a window, a door, a

wall, or another construction decision. To the homeowner, it’s their home.

And sometimes the contractor needs that reminder too. Especially when the

homeowner happens to be his wife. Stay tuned for Part 2.