Are you a home owner? If you are, there may come a time when you need a contractor to work on the outside of your house. The usual things you might need this contractor for are painting, siding, brick work, cement work or electrical work, not to mention plumbing. The telephone books are full of the names of contractors, but can they all be trusted, that is the question? Most of them are honest, especially the ones that advertise in the phone book. There is also the option of getting a contractor from a place like Sears or one of the big home repair supply stores like Home Depot. The down side of this is that you will usually pay more. I remember a friend of mine who went through a well know store for his contractor. He wanted a fence erected around his house. When he was given the estimate he remarked that he thought it was rather high. He was told by the contractor that he always had to add about 20% onto the price when people went through the store. He said that if you went directly to him it would save you this money. You see the store just used neighborhood business people but you paid more for its warrantee.

Be very careful when people come to your door and say that they are doing work in your area and since they are there, they will give you a great price on work. One enterprising crook would look for work being done in an area and knock on doors claiming to be with the company doing the work. He would then tell you that he would do work at an unbelievable price since he was here anyway. If you agreed he would tell you he needed the money for just the supplies and they would be delivered tomorrow. Oh yeah, if you gave cash there was no tax, but in most places home improvement is tax free. At the end of the day he took his booty and ran, never to be seen in that area again. As bad as this was, there are some people who are even worse. They come to your door and tell you that they are working in the area and will give your house a free inspection and if anything is wrong, they will fix it very cheaply. If you agree, they do things like climb up to the roof and rip off a piece and bring it back down to show you how damaged the roof is. If you give them any money, you lose it and get damage besides.

Another problem is hiring people who are really not good contractors. The contractor you hire may just be starting out. He might have been in an entirely different profession and just did a few repairs at home before deciding to go into business. Hiring this man to do something like installing your new roof might cost you much more in the long run. There are many roofs out there that look fine, but never had a vapor barrier or vent installed. In a few years the wood under the shingles will rot because of this. Another problem might be shingles that are not installed properly causing them to blow off on windy days.. There can be a big difference in price when you have your home vinyl sided. The range of thickness or gauge of vinyl siding that is usually used by contractors is from .040 which is economy to .048 which is premium. Always check the gauge when comparing prices. The insulation is also important, check the quality of insulation that will go under the siding. To give you an idea of the cost of materials alone, vinyl siding costs from $0.45 to $1.90 uninstalled per square foot. But how do you know which vinyl siding to choose? If you don't know then you can not make an intelligent choice. One contractor might be thousands of dollars cheaper than another, but the more expensive contractor may be the best in the long run. Consumer Reports states that the most important qualities for vinyl siding is color retention and rigidity.

Another thing you should do when hiring a contractor is make sure he will be working only on your job until it is finished. Some small contractors, while they do fine work, take forever to finish a job. They run from job to job and back again, sometimes taking weeks or months to finish a two day job, this is called spiking in the industry. This leaves you in disarray much longer than necessary. When hiring a plumber for a job that requires moving pipes or installing showers, tubs or sinks get several estimates first and when you do settle on one plumber, make sure he is not going to cut through any support beans to run pipes. This has happened to me, a plumber actually cut 6 inches out of an 8 inch floor support beam before I caught him. If you are going to hire painters, try and check out their work first. There is nothing worse than to hire painters and find out that they dripped paint all over your roof making you house look like a mess from the street.

You have to be careful with hiring any contractor but it seems there are more con men in siding and roofing than any of the other trades. I am not trying to maligned all those good, honest tradesmen out there, this doesn't apply to you. When hiring anyone check their license and insurance. You can also call the better business bureau and see how many complaints they have against them. Remember if the price is too good than there must be something wrong.