It was almost a gut remodel—we kept the exterior bones, but we removed a lot of the walls inside. The reason I chose my contractor was a referral—a good friend of mine owns a beautiful hair salon in Los Angeles and he did a really good job on that project. But I should have known. It took an entire year to do the whole thing, but I didn't realize that, I just saw the end result. Also, the interior designer and the two owners didn’t travel and were always at the job site, whereas I was traveling a lot. Would I have to babysit him? I didn’t ask any of those types of questions.
Content
I came back from a month of traveling and realized how slow the house was moving—maybe one wall had been knocked down. The contractor’s excuse was, “We can’t get the inspector in to knock this wall down.” Because of my interior design background, I knew the number to call. So, instead of saying, “Oh, really? OK,” I immediately called the city and got an inspector the next day. I knew he was lying.
It’s essentially a money issue. If you want somebody full-time on your job site every single day, all day long, then you have to pay for that. You have to factor in those costs so that the contractor doesn’t take on other jobs. And if that’s not something you can do, then you need to appoint one person who can babysit and monitor everybody.
TIME IS MONEY: "The biggest issue that people don’t understand is the timeline," Aimee explains. "Contractors don’t work on only one project, no matter how big it is." Before the reno began, wallpaper reigned in the kitchen and everywhere else.
