Being Ghosted By the Contractor

Dinnertime on a Sunday is not my favorite hour to discuss home-improvement projects with a prospective contractor, but there I was, eagerly showing this one my basement. I was willing to take what I could get. Of the three I called, he was the only one who showed up.

He seemed promising, spending almost two hours in my basement measuring walls and floors, listening as I explained in exhaustive detail my plans to replace the floor and ceiling, install lighting and paint the knotty pine panel walls. He had ideas! He loved my basement! (Who loves a basement?) It would be gorgeous, he promised. He had remodeled a friend’s basement and she had given him good reviews.

By the time he left, I was smitten. All I had to do now was wait for his bid. A week went by with no word. I chalked it up to his busy schedule. He seemed excited about my project. How could he turn me down?

At the end of week two, I nudged him with a cheery reminder email. Nothing.

Another week and I sent another note. This time he responded. I eagerly opened the email only to find a half-page proposal with scant information, just a vague bullet list with a dollar sum at the bottom. When I asked for more detail and references, I never heard from him again.

I had been ghosted, and I’d barely made it past the first date. Did I do something wrong?

This was not my first experience with a vanishing contractor, and I’m not even talking about what happens after you sign a contract and the work begins. I’m talking about contractors who say they’ll come at 3 p.m. to look at your kitchen and never show up. Or the ones who spend hours waxing on about what the future holds for your bathroom, and then never call again.

My experience is not uncommon among homeowners looking to hire tradespeople. Sometimes, it feels like they’re the ones swiping left. The experience can leave you wondering: Was it something I said?

It might be.

“That first meeting is a date,” said Angie Hicks, a co-founder of Angie’s List. “Treat it as such.”

At the interview, a homeowner might have the cash, but a good contractor has the leverage. With Americans spending huge sums on home improvement, and skilled workers in short supply, contractors can cherry-pick the projects they want, leaving many of us wondering if we’ll ever find someone to do the work. In 2016, American homeowners spent $361 billion on home improvement, repairs and maintenance, a 13.5 percent increase from the last peak in 2007, when they spent $318 billion, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

All these new bathrooms and kitchens have drained the supply of skilled laborers. In the Northeast, for example, 63 percent of contractors who responded to a 2017 survey by the Associated General Contractors of America reported having difficulty finding skilled craft workers like carpenters, electricians and laborers, and 24 percent of them expected the labor shortage to worsen in the coming year.

This abundance of work does not entirely explain why a contractor would spend two hours in someone’s home feigning interest for a job he knows he has no time to do. Maybe it’s something else; maybe he’s just not that into you.

“They’re judging you right out of the gate,” said Chip Wade, the contractor and master carpenter on HGTV’s “Curb Appeal: The Block” and a Liberty Mutual consultant. Homeowners can be fickle and uncertain about what they want, traits that can set a busy contractor’s teeth on edge. “That gets old really fast.”

Homeowners who have not decided on finishes or only have vague design plans may seem indecisive and high maintenance. Those who want to roll up their sleeves and help — two-thirds of homeowners do some home-improvement work themselves, according to a Liberty Mutual study — can seem like potentially incompetent apprentices. Scrutinize the bid too closely and you may look like a penny pincher who will balk if work uncovers a costly problem. “You don’t want to go work for somebody who you know off the bat is going to be a pain,” said Joe Savage, owner of Savage Home Improvements in Morristown, New Jersey.

While homeowners have one set of must-haves, like a reliable professional who will do the job well, contractors keep another list. Savage looks for clients who come prepared with blueprints, sketches and a thorough list of materials. “They come to the table with something,” he said. “They don’t just say, ‘I think I want to do this, I want to do that.'” Even if you do your homework, though, you could still get left at the altar.

After Leigh Ann Jones bought a 2,000-square-foot fixer-upper near Athens, Georgia, in 2015, she and her fiancé, Curt Goodin, decided they wanted to get repairs done quickly. They drew up designs and made itemized lists of the scope of the work, with details down to the type of waterproofing for the shower.

A parade of contractors toured the house, but few followed up. One said he had the flu for three weeks. Others didn’t return calls or wouldn’t provide references. With no responses, work couldn’t start, delaying when Jones, a 31-year-old patent paralegal, and Goodin, a 37-year-old commercial photographer, could move in and stop paying rent elsewhere. She couldn’t understand why no one bothered to just say no. “Don’t string me along,” she said. “Just tell me.”

After I was ghosted, I called the friend who had referred the contractor. Rather than come to his defense, she commiserated. After their first project together, she had wanted him to update her bathroom, but he hadn’t returned any of her calls.

Hicks of Angie’s List sees the early rejection as a good thing, not an ominous one. “Breaking up on the first date is easier,” she said. “You don’t want someone that’s half in it.”

I called another round of contractors, this time laying out exactly what I wanted before scheduling a visit.

That strategy yielded mixed results. One wanted the job, but insisted I gut the room down to the studs — a project I hadn’t suggested. Another, a local legend who arrived in a fedora, berated me for wanting to update the room at all and suggested I string up a few florescent fixtures and call it a day. “People would die for a room like this,” he said. Sure, the expanse of knotty pine probably looked fantastic when it was installed in the 1970s, when I was in diapers. But now it was dark with a stained and damaged ceiling, a look my children described as “creepy.”

Finally, I tried a more prominent contractor in the area with a showroom and a substantial crew. I assumed he would be more expensive than the rest, but figured he might at least show up. He came by on a Sunday morning with a sales associate and walked me through what he would do. They would work within my budget. He said they could accommodate my timeline and even help select materials.

I nodded, by now jaded. But then, three days later, a bid arrived, detailing all we had discussed at a reasonable price. A day later, the sales associate called to ask if I had questions and provided me a list of references.

Against all odds, I had finally found my match.