BIDDING WARS

So now that we owned the house in all it's ragged glory, at the top of our priority list was soliciting bids so that when that elusive permit did finally get reviewed and approved by the village, we'd be ready with contractor in hand to commence de-ragging it.  Not sure what that means, just thought it worked here.

So cute that I still thought they'd get around to that permit review any day now.

J of course contacted a few guys from his days with his dad's home building company and he posted the project on Blue Book and Service Magic and got a great response.

Blue Book produced way more leads than Service Master. The only advantage to Service Magic is that the contractors are prescreened and have a reputation to maintain through Service Magic, so it feels less risky.

Speaking of risky, that is of course the method that I chose to take. We were looking for a bid blitz basically, hoping for quantity over quality initially just to get a really good hold on where the pricing should be at.

I posted a general ad on Craigslist (the land of crazies) describing the entire project and soliciting all types of bids and within a matter of a few hours of placing the post, already had 80 emails log jamming my inbox.

I promptly removed the ad just to allow me to deal with the 80 contractors that had already contacted me practically foaming at the mouth for work.  Again - enter state of economy. 

Honestly, of those 80, only about 20% of those contractors even replied back to me after giving them drawings to bid and stating all our requirements. So really I could have used more, but between all those sources, we felt we had solicited a good amount of bids.

Now mind you, part of the reason I think I only had a 20% response back was that we were very stringent in our requirements. To do work in Oak Park, you have to be registered, licensed (if the trade requires it), bonded, and insured. A lot of small time contractors who are probably your most sketchy bunch can't meet those requirements. Oh, and we were asking for references as well. I mean come on - we're not that brain damaged!

One other resource I used was a local start up company called MyLinkPros.  They are a contractor referral service with just a few leads.  But they all come highly recommended by the owner of MyLinkPros with many references and you can feel pretty safe using any of them. Unfortunately, they were all pretty much our highest bids as well, so we weren't able to use any of them.  But good resource in a pinch.

It was interesting the kinds of bids we got back. Everything from "are you employing small children to do the labor for you?"  to "do you think we're building the Taj Mahal here?"

One other unique facet to this bidding process was that if a contractor was not able to get back to us in a timely manner via the internet (or could not compose an email in somewhat coherent English) - they immediately dropped way down on the list of likely hires.  Because this renovation is not our full time job, we had to find contractors that are willing to work in a slightly atypical fashion - i.e. need to be technologically plugged in, in some fashion.  This is the only way we'll be able to manage the process and work our day job at the same time.  Answering phones and being on the job site all day long is just not an option.  It will be interesting to see how it goes with these guys.

For those of you who know us, you know that there are some serious excel spreadsheets at work here keeping track of all of this...  wink.