Contractors

Getting work done on your house is a pain. Nobody is trustworthy, nobody knows anything for sure, and there’s no way to avoid “peek and shriek” moments when you finally get that wall open to reveal the 80 year old work underneath. I’m sure the same is said by contractors about us homeowners.

Here are some resources I had no idea existed until this year:

The Rhode Island Contractor’s Registration Board has a searchable database which keeps track of which contractors have outstanding violations against them, current insurance, permanent employees, etc. They also allow you to search by contractor name instead of company name. This is a nifty way to reveal that some contractors simply accumulate complaints and then change company names.

Vision Appraisal, despite committing web design sin number 3 (Mandatory Flash intro to their site) provides access to their database of home valuations and purchases. We learned, for example, that contrary to popular belief…our house has changed ownership fairly rapidly in the past decade. Grrrrrrrr.

And finally, East Providence has a web site. Doing building code research isn’t hard, it’s easy. These are short, to the point documents that address questions on which contractors have been trying to BS me.