By Chris Kirkham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 2, 2006

On past home improvement projects, Honey Levitzky couldn't be rid of her contractors soon enough. Sometimes drunk, almost always disorganized, they made the already disruptive experience more difficult.

But then she met Konstantin Romenskii through a friend at church, and she can't have him over enough. He refurbished her Silver Spring basement, drawing up his own plans, and was on call for any minor problem she had, from leaky faucets to broken air conditioners.

"I hit the lotto with this one," she said.

Gabi Nichols had a less inspiring contractor experience. She hired her best friend's husband to renovate the basement of her Chantilly home, but crews showed up sporadically, electrical outlets were damaged, subcontractors didn't get paid.

"I feel like I was really snowed big time," she said.

End of friendship.

On the surface, hiring a contractor is a simple business relationship -- money paid for services rendered. But in reality, people who have renovated their homes say, letting crews of five to 10 total strangers into one's personal space for weeks, even months at a time is an act of trust. It can go well, developing into a longstanding camaraderie where contractors are treated to Christmas cards, after-work barbecues and ample referrals. Or it can go terribly wrong, leading to horror stories of unfinished jobs and eventual lawsuits.

The terrain can be just as complicated for contractors. There are the fickle clients who don't know what they want, the nosy homeowners who get in the way and, in the worst case, the clients who refuse to pay.

The result can be a stalemate, with each side cautiously eyeing the other through a prism of past experiences and stereotypes.

"It's sort of like a marriage," said Stephen Sieber, owner of SCS Contracting Group in Burtonsville. "There's a lot of different people and a lot of different variables. It's a challenging situation."

Tales from the front lines of home renovation show both the highs and lows of the contractor-homeowner collaboration, where relationships can lead to a dream home or a months-long purgatory of missed phone calls and misplaced drywall. But by keeping a clear business plan from the beginning and staying constantly in touch about progress, many of the pitfalls can be avoided.

He seemed like the safest bet. Although he wasn't the lowest bidder for their $50,000 basement renovation, the contractor for the Nicholses' Chantilly home was a family friend who could surely be trusted.

But just weeks into the spring 2005 job, things started going south. Crews installed carpet before the walls were painted. Nichols found strange pipes sticking out of the walls. The contractor installed brass door hinges instead of the satin nickel she had requested.

Then about two months into the job, a painter showed up early one Saturday morning threatening to put a lien on the house. The main contractor had not paid him, he said.

Crews didn't show up for weeks at a time, so Nichols started compiling a lengthy "punch list" of items that needed to be fixed before the end of the job. She called repeatedly, often begging her contractor to correct problems.

The contractor saw this as nitpicking. He stopped taking her calls, with the basement still in disarray. Nichols said her friend, the contractor's wife, was just as evasive. The two haven't talked since last fall.

"Never deal with friends," said Nichols, who gets "a knot in my stomach" any time she goes into the basement. "He took that friendship trust thing and turned it around."

The ceiling fan was never installed, tile around the basement sink is still missing, there's no shower bar and, despite repeated requests for a correction, the shower head for her 6-foot-3 husband, Jason, is about a foot too low.

Although many contractor disputes have landed in court, frustrations often boil over into the online realm through blogs and neighborhood e-mail lists. Established Web sites such as that of Washington Consumers' Checkbook give homeowners a chance to vent about contractors.

Posts range from compliments to frustrated screeds. One homeowner wrote: "Their motto seems to be, 'The customer is always wrong and we can do whatever we like, whenever we like and however we want regardless.' "

Common complaints usually involve unresolved details at the end of the project and jobs taking longer than expected.

The Washington area Better Business Bureau gets more inquiries about the home remodeling industry than any other. The industry gets the third most complaints, coming in behind cellphone companies and computer and Internet repair.

Homeowners' top gripes are work not starting on time, price increases after work has been started and contractors who don't clean up their messes, according to a survey conducted earlier this year by Opinion Research Corp.

But for every horror story of a rogue repairman bilking a customer, contractors have an equal number of war stories about former clients.

According to that survey, the top contractor complaints are customers who want more work without more money, those who make untimely payments and those who try to renegotiate prices. Other nightmare scenarios mentioned in the survey: contractors who make romantic propositions and customers who distract workers by constant conversation.

But the relationship need not be adversarial. Leslie Sewell has worked with a slew of contractors in the past, including on a sunroom addition that was critical for her daughter's wedding. It was a quick turnaround, but checking the status with her contractor got the room completed just in time -- one day in advance -- for the celebration.

"I think a lot of people look at contractors as sort of servants, not part of a team, and they treat them accordingly," said Sewell, who lives in Northwest Washington. "A lot of these guys who do this kind of work are professionals. They're proud of their work, and they want to be treated that way."

Gordon Green of Multiple Services Inc. in Burke takes pride in tackling any job. But even he was thrown for a loop by one request.

The homeowners were trying to move, but their giant leather couch wasn't budging. They had put in a living room addition but, by the time the project was complete, the only door to the outside was smaller than the sofa. Movers refused to deal with it, so Green and his crews removed a kitchen window to rescue the couch.

The more common challenge, Green said, is the inexperienced customer who lives in an older house.

"An old place is a Pandora's box," he said. "It's like an artichoke where every time you peel back one layer there's another one."

Archaic galvanized pipes and plaster walls make for difficult working conditions and require hardware and materials not usually available at Home Depot or Lowe's. Add a client who already distrusts contractors, and the job becomes more difficult.

Green said the key for contractors is to make themselves available to the client. As long as clients know they can get a contractor on the phone, the anxiety goes away, he said.

Changes to the work required -- and the ensuing price negotiations after a contract has been signed -- can mean additional headaches.

"When you're in a grocery store, you don't buy bread and milk and then come to the register to start discussing prices," said Romenskii, of Domus Inc. in Rockville.

He has a small operation, often handling both design and construction for renovations. Past customers have taken advantage of his company's size, he said, refusing to pay their entire bill because they think he can't afford to go to court.

One of his contractor friends was fired from a job because the customer felt he had learned enough about home repair from watching the workers -- a sort of free seminar.

"They're looking at us like it's something they've bought for the time being," Romenskii said. "But we're the ones who are changing their lifestyles."

Levitzky, the Silver Spring homeowner who worked with Romenskii, was so pleased with his plans for her basement that she let him take full control.

"He could have done just about anything downstairs that was in my budget," Levitzky said. "Wherever I go to in the future, he's going to go with me."

Her only complaint was that he couldn't work on a house she bought in Baltimore, where some local crews stole her tools and even the pipes beneath her sink. The commute would be too far, Romenskii told her.

Although she had a great experience with her basement design, she cautioned that it's important to be on the same page with your contractor throughout the process. Otherwise the homeowner will end up with the contractor's vision.

Claudia and Harold Alderman knew exactly what they wanted from their modest one-story house in the Shenandoah Valley: It would be their dream home, a place to retire once their children graduated and moved off to college. They wanted to transform the two-bedroom house with a 2,000-square-foot two-story addition, complete with a new kitchen, master bathroom and see-through fireplace.

The only problem was finding the right contractor. The building boom in Washington's suburbs was siphoning off local workers. So the Aldermans instead arranged for a longtime loyal contractor, Fernando Garcia, and his crew to move out to their home near Woodstock for six months.

Garcia, who owns AAA Enterprises Inc. in Fairfax County, had embarked on major projects before, but nothing quite so ambitious. He had worked with the Aldermans for more than a decade on their Cleveland Park home.

"This was my crown jewel," Garcia said.

After having little luck finding local contractors to try such a large-scale project, Claudia Alderman decided to make Garcia the in-house project manager. He and four workers spent six months Monday through Friday on the property, building essentially a two-story house from scratch.

The Aldermans usually came out on weekends, but trusted Garcia so much that they left behind their dog, Snowball, to play on the property.

"Fernando said he was going to issue him a hammer and drill and start paying him a wage," Claudia Alderman said.

Constant communication helped the job go forward, with Alderman calling Garcia at least two or three times a day.

"He'd ask where do you want the faucet, what type of bathtub do you want, which direction do you want the door to open?" she said. "I tend to be more hands-on, and Fernando likes that."

Stung by dodgy contractors in the past, many homeowners latch on to good help when they find it.

Donna Beuttell has peppered her Dupont Circle neighbors with fliers about a neighborhood handyman, Ariton Ismaili. She found an advertisement for him at the True Value on 17th Street NW last year and decided she would give him a try.

Where previous handymen wanted to jack up prices and were unresponsive, Beuttell said, Ismaili did exactly what she asked for on jobs such as replacing tile in the entryway. She called him early one morning after hearing a thump in her pipes. He was on another job, but he described how to fix the problem over the phone and said he could be there in minutes if necessary.

"He was so different from the others," Beuttell said. "He dealt with the issue itself; he didn't say, 'Oh, it also needs this or that.' "

Since she stuck 118 fliers in neighborhood mailboxes, Ismaili said, his cellphone calls -- and the number of house keys on his keychain -- have grown astronomically. He even asked Beuttell to hold off on sending out another flier so that he could catch up.

"It's very great when you feel friendly with customers and are also in business together," said Ismaili, 30, who came to the country seven years ago as a refugee from Kosovo.

Consumer groups and contractors agree that the key to a successful job is finding a common ground from the beginning. That comes mostly through a well-conceived contract that will prevent surprises down the road.

For customers, that means being realistic about what you can afford. For contractors, it's being patient with clients who aren't used to work being done in their homes.

"When you're remodeling, you're invading their sacred territory," said Everett Collier, president of the National Association of the Remodeling Industry and owner of a contracting company in San Francisco. "It feels like the Visigoths have just come over the pass, and that can lead to a lot of stress."

Many homeowners say the best relationships stem from just knowing they can get someone on the phone.

Lisa Leathwood used Romenskii, the Maryland contractor, for renovations on three bathrooms in her Arlington home. At the end of the job, she and her husband actually told him he should charge more in the future.

It was the little things that distinguished him, she said: getting a discount on tile through a friend, calling with updates throughout the day, furtively chipping off a piece of sample granite when they couldn't meet him at the store.

Some clients give their contractors more than good references. For a job well done, Victor Mendieta got a $200,000 thank you.

An older couple in Montgomery County regularly called on him for house repairs, often for routine odd jobs such as changing light bulbs or moving furniture. When the couple decided to move to Florida, selling the house became a tough task.

Fed up with real estate agents and a protracted selling process in the late 1990s, they asked Mendieta to name a price on their house -- and took a couple hundred grand less than it was really worth, by his estimate.

The grateful couple has since died after their move to Florida, but he has a number of loyal clients who stay on his holiday mailing list and provide ample references. But with new customers, he said, there's a healthy amount of suspicion at the beginning.

"I have to tell them that we're here doing business; we're not here to rob or make good off of them," said Mendieta, of Unlimited Home Services in Bethesda, who has received gift certificates and home-cooked meals from clients.

Matt Johnson was so pleased with his U Street-area basement renovation by SCS Contracting that he had a barbecue for the crew.

"On Thursday or Friday I'd bring beer home -- after the power tools were disconnected," he said. "I mean, let's face it, they're crawling all throughout your house for a couple of months. It was a nice way to say thanks."