What Is a General Contractor?

A licensed General Contractor is a building professional who is an expert in the building processes. Due to his extensive education and experience, he can coordinate all aspects of a building project; supervise skilled labor and handle multiple projects simultaneously.

To realize how difficult and time consuming this process, consider a few of the tasks involved:

• Obtaining appropriate permits and legally building to federal, state and local building codes.
• Utilization of competitive, procured resources both to optimize budget and provide the highest skill levels per trade.
• Scheduling projects to ensure optimal completion of each task and secure fluidness of the overall project, preventing delays.
• Effectively coordinating and supervising all aspects of work to be performed to ensure quality to industry standards.
• Warranty assurances after occurrences are reported.
• Efficient legal contracting and financial management guaranteeing your overall experience.

A General Contractor is able to call upon a number of skilled craftsmen and competitive specialty contractors to deliver better quality at more efficient pricing and in a timely fashion. The rational for this is due to the on-going relationship between him and his staff.

A well positioned General Contractor will know which materials and installation methods to avoid and can protect you from poor workmanship, unreliability or unethical business practices. He or she will provide the most talented service through use of state-of-the-art tools and materials, building technology, computer aided design software and information system management. A General Contractor will also have the necessary bonding and insurance to limit your liability

Coming In On Budget

Sometimes homeowners attempt to take on their project acting as their own General Contractor. There are a limited amount of situations where this works. For example, if the homeowner has lots of time to:

• Manage a budget
• Coordinate and schedule overlying project trades
• Construction process and material knowledge
• Obtain necessary building permits
• Build to code
• Negotiate successfully
• Manage tasks and employees effectively
• Has some experience in contract and construction law

If you don’t have the time or experience, another alternative would be to hire a building consultant or construction project manager.

From my experiences and customer feedback, it is worth the extra money to avoid the stress, time consumption and difficulty. The General Contractor definitely earns his keep. Most of the problems that occur when the Homeowner serves as the General Contractor have to do with the fact that the Homeowner has little or no previous experience with contracting in the building trades. This inexperience causes the homeowner to be unaware or forget numerous tasks, which must be accomplished for scheduling sequence and cost control, and eventually leads to passing through overall time and budget constraints.

If you do not handle these difficulties well, you can ruin your budget. Forgotten paperwork, missed meetings, delayed material deliveries, unreturned phone calls, subcontractor last minute cancellations, wrong decisions; these things can lead to "Cost Overruns". We believe that if you attempt to act as the General Contractor you will save little money. In fact, we believe there's a large chance you will spend more than you would have spent if you had hired a professional General Contractor.

“You have no more need to act as your own General Contractor than you do to act as
your own physician, dentist, or lawyer.”

In Summary…

Selecting a General Contractor will ensure that all bases are covered and secure overall piece of mind. Only one person will be fully responsible for your entire project. Your satisfaction is our goal!

We are a full service construction company with extensive experience in all aspects of interior and exterior remodeling. We want you to receive the best remodeling experience that money can buy. We believe you will be best served by selecting us as your General Contractor.