|
Often the subject of these columns has been what you should be
looking for in a remodeling company.
What about the person who will actually
be in your home running the project and doing a lot of the work?
This person is the company in your eyes, as he or she is the one
you may interact with more often than the person who sold the job.
We'll call this person the lead carpenter, as we do in our company.
Some of the terms used by other companies for this position are
project manager, supervisor or foreman.
What qualities and skills might you like the lead carpenter working
on your house to have? Let's see if we can identify some of them
and why they might be important to you.
You feel you can trust the lead carpenter.
If you work away from your home the lead carpenter is going to be
in your house when you are not there. If you work at home or are
a homemaker you will still leave the house quite often.
How comfortable do you want to feel when you leave the lead carpenter
there? It can be very uncomfortable to not trust the person who
is in your home when you are not.
Feeling that the lead carpenter can be trusted makes it less likely
that you will be worried about what could be going on at your house.
What a relief that can be!
You feel that the lead carpenter can and will do high quality work.
Have you ever met someone who you trusted but was, simply put, not
competent at what they do? How unsettling and frustrating that can
be. You just can't understand how the person can seem so together
and then not do much of anything as well as you really want it to
be done.
The perfect lead carpenter does all his craftwork well and helps
others on the job do the best work possible.
More often than not, each time you come
home, you are able to look with satisfaction at the work that has
been done. You are reassured by the level of quality of the
work done, all the way through the project. From the temporary protection
work to the final items at the end of the job the lead carpenter
makes you feel you hired the right company because of the concern
for quality that he brings to the job.
You feel that the you and the lead carpenter
communicate well. Have you ever talked with someone who never
seems to hear what you have to say? The only thing they seem to
focus on is getting you to hear them! So the conversation turns
into a tennis game, with volley after volley, no resolution ever
being achieved.
The lead carpenter you probably want on your project is a great
listener, not talker. Listening is the foundation of good communication.
Without it no communication can occur.
Think about it. Every single item of work that is done on your
home is supposed to be something that has been discussed with you
and approved by you before it is built. How can that happen without
good communication between you and the lead carpenter?
You feel the lead carpenter is looking to
solve problems, not create them. One way to look at a remodeling
project is that it is a series of problems. The good remodeling
company anticipates a lot of them and tries to bring solutions to
you as part of the planning process.
Even with thorough pre-construction planning there can always be
problems of one sort or another while the job is underway.
The lead carpenter you don't want on your job will come running
to you every time something is not the way he expected it to be,
asking you what do you want him to do.
Your lead carpenter will do the following:
|
