If you’re having work done at your home, be it for building something new, working on updating your HVAC system, or packing your home for your upcoming move, any other project, it’s important that you know how to properly communicate with your contractor so that you can get the exact final product that you’re wanting. Because if you don’t know how to communicate effectively with your contractor, you could wind up not knowing what’s going on with your project, what issues may have arisen, and what you can best do to keep things moving along smoothly.
To help you with this, here are three tips for communicating with a contractor working on your home.
Set Up Communication Expectations And Preferences
As soon as you hire the contractor that you’re wanting to work with, you should set aside time to discuss what your communication expectations and preferences are. Ideally, your preferences and expectations should line up well. Otherwise, you could wind up having communication issues throughout the time that you’re working together.
As part of discussing your communication expectations and preferences, share things like what hours where you can expect same-day communication back and which form of communication is going to be best for both parties. Then, when you’re doing your communication with your contractor, make sure that you follow the guidelines that you’ve both set forth beforehand so that either party feels like they’re being ignored or being held to expectations that you didn’t outline.
Be On-Site When You Can
To help keep yourself in the loop about things, it’s wise to be on-site as often as you can to check in on how things are going and what the progress of your project is.
While having you underfoot the entire time can slow things down, it’s often good to show your face around your contractor and their team as they’re working on your project. This way, you can talk with your contractor about things each morning before work starts, see how well the work is sticking to the projected timeline, and just keep an eye on how things are going. To be less disruptive, you may want to come at a prescribed time so that you’re not getting in the way of the flow of work too much.
Get As Much As Possible In Writing
If there ever comes a time when something with your project needs to be changed, it’s best that you have this type of communication done in writing. While you can discuss things like this in-person with your contractor and their team, it’s wise to get the final details down in writing so that each side can be held accountable to the things that they’ve agreed to. Then, if something goes wrong or off from the plan in some way, you can both refer back to your written agreement to get things back on track.
If you want to have a great experience working with your contractor, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you with communicating with one another.