Why hire a General Contractor?
So you don’t end up like this
Source of information:
The Well-Built House by Jim Locke
“I encourage you to hire a custom-builder and, in many cases an architect. A custom builder or general contractor comes with few strings attached because his work history is broad, not repetitive. If you put decent price on your time, you’ll lose money at general contracting your own house. If you have little experience and plan to build your house yourself, look at it as a hobby or a fling. If you seriously want a good house built well, without medical side effects, hire it done. And to do that, you’ll have to decipher everything in advance, starting with yourself.”
- Jim Locke
Read the Foreword by Tracy Kidder
Funny, yet true!
“About ten years ago, I set out to fix up an old house by myself. Not knowing most of the names of the parts of a house or of the tools for putting one together, I went like waif to lumber yards, where I begged for morsels of information. I didn’t know I needed a lot more help than that, until I was on my way to the nearest emergency room. I had inserted the blade of a power saw about half-way through the knuckle of my right thumb. I felt like a fool, of course, and as I sat whimpering over the bloody mess, I couldn’t get out of my mind the memory of an anthropology text that had stressed the evolutionary importance of the opposable thumb. Looking back, I wish there’d been a book around like this one, to make me understand the complicated thing that I was dealing with, and to make me see the wisdom of setting aside my tools until I had the money to hire professionals, which is what I did, one stiff thumb too late.
One is never entirely sorry to see carpenters leave a job for which one is paying. The first bunch who came to my house did what I thought was pretty good work; that is, it was a lot better than mine. But they wouldn’t talk much to me, and after I overheard them making some disparaging remarks about my house, I really couldn’t wait for them to go. The next year I hired the improbably named Apple Corps. They actually let me work with them from time to time, not in anything that took skill but in holding the other end of the boards, so to speak. Jim Locke writes that homeowners who insists on working with their carpenters make the building more expensive than it has to be, but he didn’t tell me then that I was paying tuition. I felt sad when he and his partners departed. It wasn’t just that I missed their company. They interested me, the way, I suppose, accomplished craftsmen in any field interest the dabblers. I pursued them for the better part of the year before they agreed to let me watch them build a house, and write about what I saw.
I remember one of Jim Locke’s partners saying, one day on that job, that they should put a bell around my neck, so they’d know when I was nearby and could avoid saying more than they wanted me to hear. I think that at one time or another all of the people portrayed in House felt uncomfortable about my intrusions into their lives. But none ever tried to get control over what I wrote, and none, I think, tried to hide much. Journalists are lucky when the people they observe turn out to be candid, and even luckier when they turn out to be perceptive besides. Jim Locke was both, almost unfailingly, for me. From the first time I confronted him with my notebook open, he struck me as one of being honest, and also in being accurate. Jim seemed unusually disposed to think about what he did and why he did it, not failing in the meantime to examine the performances and motives of most of the people around him.
In many old pictures, house carpenters wear bow ties and long-sleeved shirts with garters at the elbows. I remember Jim on the job, dressed in less formal work clothes that still managed to convey a similar air of composure. His were always clean and neat. Behind his ear rested a freshly sharpened pencil, which with one of his molding saws – he had cut down to the size that allowed it to rest most securely there. In my memory, Jim is surveying the house’s new foundation, worried, among other things, that it may be more than marginally out of level. If it is, as foundations often are, he’ll have to put shims under the first layer of wood. That is common practice and does not make a house unstable. Moreover, once the building is finished, one can’t see the shims except from down in the basement, and only then if one looks for them. Jim is not impractically meticulous; he’ll accept shims if he has to. But he’d rather not. “Because theu look cobby,” he says.
Many people who call themselves builders nowadays have never lifted a hammer for pay. Some care about the quality of the buildings they arrange for others to construct, but they can’t possibly understand what craftsmanship in building means, the way an actual, builder such as Jim Locke does. Long before I met him, Jim had discovered that for him life was much more purposeful if he tried to do things right than if he left what he and his partners call “cob jobs” behind. Jim cares about the quality of the joinery in the parts of buildings that get covered up, as well as in the surfaces. Watching Jim and his partners at work, I gradually realized that they managed their time efficiently and calmly, in a much adult way that I had even done. I’d sawed halfway through my thumb partly out of clumsiness and partly because I’d been too much in a hurry to put a sharp blade in mu power saw, and had ended up wrestling with the tool in order to make it cut. Jim and the other members of the crew spent a lot of time keeping the construction site neat, arranging lumber piles, setting up tools and workbenches. They spent time to save time, and also their bodies. Building the staircase, Jim stopped at least once every hour, and often more frequently, to sharpen the tools he was using.
As the house arose, he began writing down the names of the owners and builders, his own included, of course, on shingle shims and on the back of moldings. He nailed these up in obscure corners, where no one except another carpenter would be likely to find them. Evidently, he was writing notes to the future, for carpenters who hadn’t been born yet but would someday come to work on the house. Later, when the builders had finished and my book was published, Jim told a reporter that he house they’d built would probably survive a lot longer than the book I’d written. I was secretly annoyed, most of all because I knew that , barring fire or bulldozers, he was probably right. Now Jim has ventured into this fragile medium, of paper rather than wood. He went about making this book in the same way he goes about building a house. He thought it all out ahead of time; he set up a production schedule, and most unlike a writer, he stuck to his plans. He was determined not to leave cob jobs behind for repair later on, but he got better as he went along, and so it pleases me to say, he had to go back and fix some of his earlier work after he got to the end of the job. This book is entirely his, and he has left his mark on it.
I remember bringing Jim a sketch for a garden shed, intended for my yard. He looked at it and said, “This isn’t what you want.” He made his own sketch, and built from that. I’m still not sure he would have agreed to make the thing I’d had in mind. Jim has opinions about everything to do with building. These have made for some lively discussions when he has come up against equally opinionated customers. But certitude is what one wants in a builder, especially in one dispensing advice. In this book, Jim acknowledges his prejudices, and he describes many of the alternatives that he doesn’t like. If a reader ends up doing what Jim doesn’t want to do himself, the reader will at least know what he is getting himself into. Jim has laid out, step-by-step, the process of building a house. He has not written a manual for doing it yourself, though the book would help anyone who planned to make that error. It lays out very clear the terminology and psychological dilemmas of construction. Anyone who reads it should come away equipped to talk with builders and to begin to understand them.
I once heard Jim say, ‘My feeling about trim is, you don’t want to have a look at it more than once. It should be securely there, it should define the openings, but it shouldn’t be gimmicky.’ He has applied this self-effacing principle of aesthetic to his prose. His obvious intention isn’t flashiness, but gracefulness and explanation. Jim also once remarked, ‘The interesting parts are the edges, where things come together.’ In antique parlance, the term ‘joinery’ described the most difficult parts of carpentry. In good joinery, everything fits together snugly. This is a book by a skillful, principled joiner.
Satisfied clients
)