Scenario: You have hated your kitchen since you moved into your home. You love hosting dinner parties, but right now, there’s no space for more humans other than yourself and your closest friend (literally and figuratively) because the space is so dang small. You’ve been gathering remodeling ideas from your friend’s kitchens, you have a general idea of what you want yours to be like, and now you are ready to pull the trigger. It’s time to make these ideas swirling in your head more concrete.
Step 1: Find a general contractor. Easy right? Unfortunately, probably not. And on top of that, this kitchen is something you’ve been dreaming about for a while, and you want it to be in the hands of people you can truly trust.
What to look for in a GC?
Take a second to think of some core values that you want to be instilled in the people designing and constructing your new kitchen. Are things like good communication, honesty, quality in product, design, and outcome coming to mind? Hopefully, the answer to that is yes. If not, it’s time to up your standards.
Communication
At Inside Out Construction, we believe that communication is the core of a successful project. It’s your kitchen. Not ours. Yes, we have a designer that can help you put together all your ideas into something tangible, but in the end, they need to be your ideas.
We want you involved in every light fixture, faucet, and tile selection that’s important to you. We want to know your desired timeline for completion and stick to that.
Most importantly, we want you to feel the freedom to interact with our contractors and employees whenever you darn well please, and we feel comfortable with that because our team is honest and hard working. Construction is our job, and we take pride in a job well done.
How do we keep this level of high communication?
First, we strive to answer messages and return calls within a few hours of receiving them - next day at the latest.
Second, we schedule things, and show up on time. We know the construction industry is notorious for being late, or not showing up at all. We want to break that stereotype. We know your time is valuable, and we are not in the business of wasting it.
Third, and the most unique to Inside Out Construction, we use a messaging system called Slack to communicate with you and the rest of our employees. If you decide to use us for your project, we make a channel specifically for your project, including you, the contractors, and project lead that will be working on your home, and use that as a direct line of communication at any time throughout the project. This system allows you to ask questions, clarify details with the employees doing the work, and vice versa. We want to be able to ask you questions to make sure things get done correctly the first time.
Those three things have been incredibly helpful in sticking to the timelines and building something that everyone is proud of. We love hearing stories from clients about their first dinner party in their new kitchen, or their favorite thing about the new layout, and we often get great feedback from clients about how helpful and prompt our communication was throughout the whole project.
Here are a bit of that feedback:
“Shawn and his team did a major project for me (remodeling an entire home), and the level of attention to detail, communication, and pride of ownership made me happy every step of the way.” - Sami
“Very communicative and easy to stay in sync with.” - Ben
“They are extremely personable, hands-on, and consistently reachable at all times.” - Jared
If you’d like to read more for yourself, check out our Google, Yelp, and Houzz reviews!
Clearly, we value communication over almost everything else, and we hope that you find that to be an important quality in a General Contractor. Stay tuned for the next “Core Value” blog as we dig into high quality work in every circumstance, especially when it comes to creating your dream, party hosting, kitchen.