Prepare Your House For Sale

Save Money On Your House 3rd Edition

Save Money On Your House 3rd Edition

Well, we left off in the 2nd edition with looking at large contractors and their big fancy ads and trucks. Now again, I don’t see why people don’t see through this. Many of them do low quality work on your house and charge high prices. The same thing can happen on the opposite side also. The small contractor provides poor quality work on your house, because their too cheap on the quote, but still need to pay their bills. This leads you into the, who do I hire to work on my house? The answer is the right one. Just kidding. I am not a 3-10 quote person for getting work done. I am a contractors favorite to deal with as I do my research on my own to see what things should cost for the work on my house and if I think they are fair I will hire them on the spot. You can do the same for the work on your house. Now, your saying to yourself thats what a quote does. No, a quote tells you what the contractors wants to charge you for their services on your house. You need to jump on the Internet in your free time and look around. Their are forums for just about everything and anything. There is a forum which only deals with hydro-seeding, for those who don’t know this is a process for installing a lawn on your house. which, by the way is one of the best ways to get a new lawn installed.You find a forum and see who is having work done on their house and what they paid. be careful as different parts of the country can have very different rates. Remodeling in the great-lakes area or Wisconsin costs 10-30% more due to the age of the houses and the extra work which must be done to remodel houses there. Talk with people on the forums or even self help sites. Find out what it would cost to do the project yourself. There use to be a rule of thumb, materials cost and then double it for labor, then take the two and add them. The total is what you expect to pay. Now, windows is a hard area as the bigger the company the more they normally charge when looking at windows.

Let’s take your house and say you want a new bay window. The window is 5 ft. x 4.5ft. high. This window depending on how big the window company is will cost them depending on all materials $950-$3,000 for their cost for the windows. The numbers are only for example as there are to many ways to determine the actual cost of a window, because of all its possible features. So, your house needs one bay window we will say. They come out and measure you up and give you the big sales pitch on why their window is the best. You tell them thanks I am getting some other quotes. They tell you $4,500 which by the way would be a good price for a fully installed bay window.

The $4,500 can be divided in half, the window cost them $2,250 their cost for the window. Remember, the bigger the company the bigger their discount for your windows for your house. It may just cost them $1,550 and then they don’t pass their wholesale discount on to you. That is their discount for the volume of windows they do. So, now they mark the window cost up to $2,250. They then take that number and take a percentage as labor. As a contractor you would take 50% markup and that was your labor costs. The booming remodeling, window replacement market blew the pricing off the charts. You can pay $5,500 on a bay window easily now days.

The break down would be their cost $1,550 window, labor/crew $300 if they are paying their people well. So, their cost $1,850 plus tax. Your house and your cost $4,500 plus tax. Remember, the $2,250 is after they mark up the window. Then multiply by 2 and you get your final number without tax. This was the easy way for contractors to come up with the final quote for your house. The 50% was the most popular for many years the 100% is now becoming the norm. So, one more look. You have a $12,000 window quote for your house, this in turn would be $8,000 materials and then $4,000 for the labor. Which is a very reasonable quote for your house windows. I have heard of people replacing 10-15 windows and costing $20,0000 plus! You can see why so many wanted to get into the window replacement market. Now, if you have a scammer company as I call them, they send out cheap illegal labor at $5.00 per hour to put your windows in. You see what I am talking about, guess who is laughing all the way to the bank. The problem is this is becoming more and more the norm. Large companies using cheap or cheap and illegal labor. Really all they are doing is exploiting these poor people for their personal gain.

The landscaping and yard work has just burst with companies using cheap and illegal help. Don’t bother to ask who is going to be working on your house. They are not going to tell you some cheap and Illegal labor so I can make more profit help. You can ask before you sign your house contract who does the work and how much experience do they have. This will only help you later after it’s to late when your already in court because the cheap help could not read the installation instructions. It is very hard to watch out for this tactic, you can protect yourself by not always going with the cheapest quote. This is one way. The ones who use the cheap and illegal help to do work on your house will normally be the cheapest because they are paying nothing for labor. This year has been a big year for this type of thing to happen. The housing market down these companies were doing anything and everything to get the chance to work on your house.

Many people did hire these companies as they are the cheapest. What they don’t realize this is why they get poor quality work. The pay structure does not reflect a quality rate for educated and quality workers. This is also why you see it in landscaping so much. You can’t screw up mulch or rocks to much. They can put it were you don’t want it. It’s not like building the foundation of your house, you don’t see the volume of cheap and illegal help in the strong trade areas. They might me a helper or a clean up person. Just be careful as this type of labor can cost you big when things turn out bad or missing! I really don’t see why people think its alright to break the laws to have work done on their house by illegal help. It is breaking the law to rob a bank also, they wouldn’t do that. These contractors obviously find it no problem breaking the law. If they use cheap illegal help, hence the illegal part, that means it is against the law. What is going to happen next? Which laws are people going to follow? Only the ones they like! I am a law bidding citizen who believes in our country and its laws.

When the laws are finally enforced you will see the quality level of work on your house go up. The rates will actually go down also. More people won’t be getting scammed, placing more money into our great economy allowing people more expendable cash flow to do the work. You can ask people what level of quality they got and were they happy with the contractor they used. The whole reference game is not always the best as they are not going to give you the name and number for a customer who filed a complaint against them. Asking around and doing some research on your own can save your house and you thousands of dollars every year.

I am sure someone will have the nerve to say they did like this edition as I stated I don’t believe in breaking the countries laws and using cheap and illegal help. Many people have fought and died to be part and a legal citizen of this country. This is a large problem and is why you pay so much to have your house worked on. If you think not look at how much in tax you pay every day. If illegal labor collects funds from Social security fund but never pay in, where is the money coming from? Thats right you the law bidding tax paying citizen of this country.

Well, your house is saving already by you reading this, because you will not get scammed if you are educated about the scammers. Education for all will save us all money in the end.

Remember always safety first.