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Chris Donatelli Builders' Policy: Fair and Honest Pricing
Chris Donatelli Builders'
unwavering policy is to provide you with fair and honest pricing.
What does that mean? Fair pricing means we will not estimate
a project for less than it will take to do properly and to
our company’s high standards. Fair also means that should
some unexpected cost come up after the contract is signed,
such as a change order, we will not take advantage of the situation
and charge you an unfairly high price just because we can.
We also pay special attention in our process to minimizing
the need for costly change orders, helping our projects stay
on-budget.
Honest pricing means we will not provide you a misleadingly
low price just to win a project. Some remodelers provide
low-ball prices to win projects, expecting to add additional
charges
before the project is completed. This almost always turns
out to be bad for the homeowner. Here is why:
There are many ways for remodeling firms to provide you
a low price. Most of these ways require that they reduce
the
quality
of materials they use or lower their level of craftsmanship
by hiring lower-skilled workers, taking improper shortcuts,
failing to obtain proper liability and workers comp insurance,
not spending the time to develop quality control standards
and production processes that help assure a proper outcome,
failing to supervise their staff and subs, using substandard
subcontractors, failing to get required building permits
and inspections or having you get the building permits,
making you unknowingly responsible for any mistakes they
make, or
any one of many other price-lowering approaches that
are not
in your best interests.
You may not learn about some of these practices until
it is too late. For example, if your remodeler uses
thinner sub-flooring
materials and a lower grade of floor joists, the floor
will initially look good and will even meet building
codes.
However,
soon you will find that it squeaks, bounces when you
use the room, and is in general not the quality you
expected. As a
homeowner, would you think to ask what type and dimension
of sub-flooring or floor joists they used to estimate
the
project?
Would you know if what you are told will be used will
be sufficient?
Some remodelers simply use allowances for things that
have not been specified at the time of contract signing.
This
generally makes the price seem lower. Some remodelers
base their allowances
on the lowest-priced product that will meet the minimum
building code requirements. You may find out that
everything you decide
to select exceeds the budgeted allowance.
Some remodelers just don't
have enough experience to know how to estimate a project properly
and
find themselves
in the middle
of the project without enough funds to complete
the project.
Guess who ends up paying for their mistake? You
will find that some remodelers seem to disappear when
this happens.
An industry observer has said many times that “many remodeling
horror stories start with a great price.”
For more information about how we can help you
with your project please contact
us today.
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