10 Questions to Ask a Contractor Before Hiring for a Remodel

Oct 17

4 min read

Updated: Oct 20

These are the questions to ask a contractor before hiring anyone for a kitchen, bathroom or basement. Ask all three bidders the same ten, before you compare a single price. They cover past work, insurance, what the price really includes, how payments work, who shows up every day, and what happens when something goes wrong.

Get the answers in writing, or at least in an email you can point back to later. Still collecting names? Our guide on how to find a good contractor covers where to look.

1. "Can I see a finished job like mine?"

Photos are easy to borrow from the internet. Ask for a finished kitchen, bath or basement close to yours, with the town and the year, and if you can, a homeowner you can call. You can see ours in the project gallery on our home page and on Houzz, where we've won Best of Houzz for Service six years running.

On a basement, also ask how many they've finished. A basement pulls framing, electrical, plumbing, HVAC and sometimes structural work into one job, and that's where we see things go wrong. We get called in all the time after someone without basement experience left the job half done, or finished it in a way that won't pass code. By then we're tearing out work the homeowner already paid for, and some of it is dangerous: king studs cut, a load-bearing wall left without support.

Worry if: none of the photos comes with a town, a year or a name.

2. "Can your insurance agent send me a certificate?"

Ask for the certificate, not a yes. Better yet, have the contractor's insurance agent send it to you directly with you listed as the certificate holder. Georgia contractors are expected to carry general liability, and a company with three or more employees also has to carry workers' comp, according to the Georgia Attorney General's consumer office.

If the contractor has no workers' comp, call your own homeowner's insurance agent and ask what happens if one of their workers gets hurt at your house. You'll want that answer before anyone starts demo.

3. "What exactly does this price include?"

"Kitchen remodel, $70,000" isn't a scope. A real quote names the cabinet line, the countertop material, the flooring and the appliances. It also says whether demolition, haul-away and permits are included. Most fights later in a job trace back to a vague quote.

We publish what each of our tiers includes for kitchens, bathrooms and basements, so you can hold anyone's bid up against it line by line.

Worry if: the scope fits on one line.

4. "Did you see the space before you priced it?"

A contractor who quotes a basement over the phone hasn't seen your basement. They don't know whether there's a plumbing stub-out, whether there's moisture, or where the ductwork runs. Any one of those can move the price by tens of thousands.

Worry if: the number arrived before the walkthrough did.

5. "What triggers each payment?"

This question protects you more than any other on the list. When each payment is tied to a finished stage of the work, you're never far ahead of what's actually done. A big share paid before anyone picks up a hammer puts the risk on you.

Worry if: there's a large deposit and "the rest at the end," with nothing tied to milestones in between.

6. "Will you give me lien waivers when you pay your subs and suppliers?"

Most homeowners never think to ask this one. If your contractor doesn't pay the tile supplier, that supplier can file a lien against your house, even though you paid the contractor in full. Georgia has statutory lien waiver forms for exactly this. Asking for a waiver with each payment is a normal request, and a real contractor won't blink at it.

On our jobs, we provide lien waivers for all of our subcontractors.

7. "Who's in my house every day?"

Some companies sell the job and then send whichever sub is free that week. Ask who runs the site day to day, and whether that's the same person who'll answer the phone if something needs attention next spring.

8. "What happens when you open a wall and find a problem?"

In older North Fulton homes it happens all the time. Old wiring, a slow leak nobody knew about, a joist someone notched years ago. What you want to hear is a process: "We stop, show you, price it in writing, and you approve it before we go on."

Worry if: they say it won't happen. That usually means they haven't done many.

9. "What's the schedule from signing to starting?"

Any contractor should be able to walk you through the first two weeks. Ours, counted from the day you book a walkthrough, looks like this: we call back within 12 hours, you can sign on day 2, you meet your designer by day 5, permits get filed around day 9, and construction starts around day 14. Ask what could push those dates. The honest answer is usually a back-ordered material or the permit office's inspection calendar.

Then ask how long the build takes once construction starts. It depends on the scope, but on our jobs a full gut bathroom takes about two weeks and a completely remodeled kitchen takes 30 to 60 days.

10. "How did you handle a job that went sideways?"

Every contractor has happy customers. Ask about the job that went wrong and how they fixed it. On review sites, skip the star average and read the reviews that describe a problem. How someone handled a bad week tells you more than ten "great job" reviews.