Three Words Every Contractor Says
Every remodeler in Snohomish County will tell you they are licensed, bonded, and insured.
How do you find out which ones can prove it?
In this post, you will learn where to verify a contractor’s registration yourself, the questions that separate a professional from a risk, what tenure and a warranty actually tell you, and why we treat the first phone call as a two-way interview.
How Do You Vet a Remodeling Contractor Before You Hire One?
Vet a remodeling contractor by verifying their registration at Washington State Labor and Industries, requesting their insurance certificate directly from their broker, calling references from recently completed projects, and reading their contract for a fixed price, a completion date, and a detailed scope with material specifications.
Ask for written proof of every claim rather than accepting the claim itself.
Most of that takes an afternoon.
The contractors who make it easy are telling you something, and so are the ones who stall.
The Credentials to Confirm First: Licensed, Bonded, and Insured
In Washington, that means three separate things: a current contractor registration with Labor and Industries, a bond, and liability plus workers’ compensation insurance.
At Home Run Design + Remodel, we carry one million dollars in liability coverage, a twelve-thousand-dollar bond, and workers’ compensation coverage for every employee, under license number HOMERSL941BT.
Write that number down.
What to Verify at Washington L&I
Go to HiringAContractor.LNI.wa.gov and search the registration.
You can confirm the registration is current, see how long the company has been registered, check for ‘workers’ compensation coverage for anyone on your property, and pull up pending or past legal actions against the contractor or their bonding company.
You can also see other business names they have used and any past infractions.
Why “Licensed, Bonded, and Insured” Alone Is Not Enough
Because in Washington it is illegal to perform work, advertise, or bid without being a registered contractor, the phrase describes a legal minimum rather than a standard.
Verify it anyway, and go two steps further.
Get the certificate of insurance from the contractor’s insurance agent rather than from the contractor, so you know the policy is current.
We will provide our broker’s contact information so you can independently confirm ours.
Then ask how in-house labor is classified.
Be wary of a contractor who calls their own crew independent contractors, because that is often a misclassification, and if a worker gets hurt on your property, you could be the one holding the liability.
Hire an unregistered contractor, and you could be treated as that person’s employer, responsible for wages, taxes, and workers’ comp fees.
Not a risk worth a discount.
The Questions Worth Asking Before You Commit
We keep a written twenty-five-question checklist for exactly this, and we hand it to prospects so they can run the same questions past every company they are talking to.
Ask all of us. Here are a few examples:
- Have you been in business for fifteen consecutive years under the same company name?
- Do you have a list of at least thirty references we can call?
- Do you offer a fixed-price proposal with a price guarantee, and does the agreement spell out every contingency that could change the price?
- Does the agreement give an approximate completion date in writing, not just a start date?
- Does it include a detailed scope of work with material specifications?
- Is the payment schedule tied to project milestones?
- Do your crews follow a written daily cleanup procedure?
- Do you hold written step-by-step installation processes for every major type of work you perform?
- What is your policy on returning calls and emails?
- Are you certified to work on pre-1978 homes under the EPA Lead Safe Practices Law?
We answer yes to all twenty-five and will provide written proof of compliance on request.
Our own list runs thirty-five references from recently completed projects, each with the project description, the date, and a phone number, and some of those past clients host tours of their finished rooms for people still deciding.
Our answer on the call question: morning calls returned by 1pm, afternoon calls by 6pm, and emails answered the same day.
A company unwilling to hand over its process probably should not get serious consideration.
What Real Tenure, Named Roles, and a Warranty Tell You
Tenure tells you whether the company has survived under one name, named roles tell you who is accountable for what, and a warranty tells you what happens after the invoice is paid.
All three are checkable.
Tenure and Repeat Clients
We formed in 2006, which puts us at twenty years serving Snohomish and King Counties under the same name.
Both of us came up as carpenters, building remodels, additions, and custom homes for other general contractors first.
We are still working for some of our first clients, and a number of them are on their third or fourth project with us.
Not years in the trade. Years under this company name, because that is the one you can verify.
Named Roles
Ask who, by name.
On our projects, Nate handles the initial consultation and is your first point of contact; Gunnar oversees the lead carpenters and project managers; and your lead carpenter runs the day-to-day on your site.
Only an owner or a lead carpenter can sign a change order on our side, and the people authorized to sign on your side are named when you sign the agreement.
A company that cannot tell you who fills each role is telling you those roles float.
The Warranty and What Comes After
We warrant all labor and workmanship for two years after substantial completion, against the one year most companies in our market offer.
A written two-year follow-up program brings us back at scheduled intervals, so you are not the one tracking us down.
Read the fine print on any warranty you are offered.
Ours requires you to notify us within 10 days of discovering a warranty issue, and repairs made by someone else can void the warranty.
You also get a Job Binder at completion: product manuals, a full material list with brands and model numbers, supplier and trade contacts, permits, every lien release, and photographs of where the electrical, plumbing, and HVAC run behind your finished walls.
Every one of those is something you would otherwise have to reconstruct from memory.
Why We Interview You as Much as You Interview Us
Because a design-build project runs for months and only works if the fit is right in both directions, our first conversation is an extensive, interview-style phone call for you and us.
We are trying to find out whether we are right for your project before either of us spends money finding out the hard way.
Some of what we ask is blunt.
We want your real budget, not a number you think will keep us honest, because the design can be adapted early to meet your target investment and cannot be adapted late.
We are used to both extremes: people who arrive with a binder of clippings collected over years, and people who arrive with nothing but an absolute disgust for their current bathroom.
What does not work is a call where we cannot get a conversation going, or a project where we are not the right company for.
We do not take on custom home building, insurance restoration, or exterior-only work.
Better you hear that on a first call.
What to Look for Beyond the Lowest Bid
An unusually low price usually means corners were cut somewhere, and the contract is where you find out which ones.
Read the agreement before you compare numbers.
- A low initial estimate paired with a contract full of wiggle room to upcharge for work the contractor already knew about.
- A time-and-materials contract, instead of a fixed price, often means the company cannot estimate its own costs accurately.
- A start date with no approximate completion date, which is how a crew sized for one job ends up splitting weeks between yours and the one in the next town over.
- A large deposit request. Ours is never more than five percent of the proposal price, and no single payment exceeds fifteen to twenty percent.
- No final lien waiver. Even if you pay your general contractor in full, you can still end up with a lien from an unpaid supplier or trade contractor.
We provide a final lien waiver plus waivers from every trade contractor who worked on your project.
Pay your final bill, and you can sleep at night.
Get all of it in writing.
The cheapest bid on the table is rarely the cheapest project by the time it is finished, and the contract is where that difference was decided months earlier.
Ready to Compare Apples to Apples? Start With Home Run Design + Remodel
The takeaway is that almost everything a remodeler tells you is checkable, and the checking is faster than you think.
Look up the registration, call the references, and read the contract before you look at the totals. Fill out our contact form or give us a call today. We are glad to be the first company you check.
