A clarity, purpose and simplicity are essential factors of any home improvement contract. No matter how clear a verbal communication is, it has no legal validation and if a contractor decides to break their promise, there’s nothing you can do about it. A good contract should allow you to prevent any kind of home improvement nightmare before it’s able to materialize. A detailed contract should go a long way in ensuring that you know what you will get and contractors know what they need to do. Not only that the contract should have a list of things that contractors need to do, it also needs to specify the time limit of their completion. The brand, quality an grade of the material need to be included in the contract to make sure that you will get satisfactory results. Other than the time period of when the project will start and end, we should also list projected delays, such as holidays and other times when the project stops temporarily.
It will also be a good thing if we are also able to determine who is in charge of the whole project, so he could take any responsibility related to the completion of project. It should also be clear how and when we should pay for the work. It is important to ensure that things we agree to are properly written down, including any guarantee related to the quality of work. If you don’t understand what to put in the contract, you may need to ask a local attorney. Also, you may ask the contractor to explain more about things inside the contract, but you need to make sure that you won’t be misled. It is important to know what kind of legal protections that you will get if things go rather wrong. In fact, you should make sure that you can terminate your work with the contractor at specific conditions. The rule about home improvement may vary from area to area, so you need to be aware of this fact. As an example, you may want to pay in instalments based on the project milestones. It means that each instalment is sufficient to cover the next project milestone. There should be clear and definite clause in the contract about order changes and extra fees to avoid issues and cost overruns.
The contract should allow us to keep track of everything and we should know the progress of each element of the project. The contract should necessitate a daily journal that tracks changes to the plan, materials delivered and any problem encountered. When the job has been completed, it is important to sign a certificate that the task is fully completed. Before giving the contractor the final payment, we should make sure that the local building authority has inspected all the work and they should find that all things are satisfactorily completed. In this case, we should get the lien release and it’s essential because subcontractors and suppliers could file liens against us if they don’t get payments from the main contractors.