Originally posted by normhead My step son Rick is acting a his own general contractor building his "dream home". He's hired an out of work crew to come in and help the original tradesmen, a number of whom have fallen short. He's moving out March 14th, so things need to be done. he says the new guys, regular house builder who couldn't find work for the whole winter are really good and getting him back on schedule... but he's paying two crews to do what he thought could be done by one. Possibly the result of having one of his friends put together the first crew from personal friends etc.
I feel his pain. We went through something similar 20 years ago when my wife decided to hire her best friend's husband (sold to her as God's gift to the building industry) to do a major renovation on our house. The reno involved removing the roof from a bungalow and building a second story on top of it.
His idea of a crew was to hire a gang from Labour Ready.
As expected, it was a disaster. The guy was at best one day ahead of the job at any given time, I'm pretty sure he went home at the end of the day and watched YouTube videos to see what he should do next.
He didn't know or care about building codes and considered inspectors to be the enemy. He also had a really ugly attitude. Questioning anything inevitably led to some kind of a battle.
After 6 months of putting up with his manure I pulled the plug on financing him and he went away, but not until after we were nearly 100% over budget for a half finished job and had inspectors breathing down our necks for the number of deficiencies in the build.
After that, I was the one watching YouTube videos to figure out what to do next.
I had to deal with structural issues, electrical issues and plumbing issues because the guy was an incompetent idiot.
It worked out well enough eventually, but it was not an experience I would repeat.
Self contracting is OK as long as one knows what needs to be done, which actually isn't that difficult. To me, hiring qualified trades people that know how to do it rather than people who at best know what a hammer looks like is the really important part.