Renovating a Property

[Jason Riddle]

Against everyone's advice, I decided to do some renovations in San Antonio while living out-of-state in San Francisco. Now that I have some battle scars from this good learning experience, I have some questions

1) Assume you are there in person, what are you doing day to day? Are you meeting with the contractor in the morning to review what will be done that day? Are you reviewing the work that was done yesterday to see if it was completed to your satisfication?

2) Say you already have an agreed upon list of items to fix with expected costs. What happends when a new issue comes up? Do you have the contractor send you a new agreement to sign with the updated total? Do you take a day or two to think about whether you want the issue fixed or not?

3) Say you don't want to work with the contractor anymore, but in the original contract there is still remaining work to do. How can you end this transaction? Is there a clause in the contract saying you can back out? Have you ever faced retribution because of backing out?

4) When picking out materials, do you usually buy the materials and deliver them on site or do you let the contractor buy it?