How to Lower Your Contractor Costs with Sweat Equity

Unless you’re as rich as a billionaire, you’ll be less than excited about paying those 18%-25% contractor commissions. Here are a few suggestions about ways to lower your contractor costs by doing some of the work yourself: otherwise known as sweat equity.

1. Tell; Don’t Ask Permission

The contractor doesn’t want you to do this because he will lose money. Gather your reserve and tell–don’t ask permission–the contractor that you intend to take on some of the work yourself.

2. Know Your Strengths and Limitations

Because you may be facing some opposition from the contractor, know for darn sure that you can do whatever you intend to do. Intend on wiring the whole kitchen yourself? Fine, but make sure you have done this before and can do it again within the structure of a timetable. For this reason, see the next step…

3. Do the Grunt Work Rather than the Work of Highly Experienced Pros

Unless you’re a licensed electrician or a highly experienced plumber or carpenter, you may want to take on grunt work. What’s grunt work? It’s stuff like demolition. It’s stuff like painting (though professional painters may beg to differ). It’s stuff like hauling junk out to the dump.

4. Supply Your Own Materials

The contractor may get upset if you say you want to supply everything–lumber, nails, screws, drywall, etc. And I would not recommend doing this. Let the contractor worry about these kinds of details. But it’s perfectly acceptable for you to supply things like cabinetry, flooring, fixtures, etc. This is a very simple way to save money. If the cabinetry costs $1,000, then the contractor will tack on up to $250 just for making that call to the supplier. You can do this yourself.

5. Spring it On the Contractor at the Last Minute

It may seem reasonable to let the contractor know as early as possible that you want to take on some of the work yourself. But look at it this way. If the contractor knows well in advance that he will be losing out on part of his commission, he may jack up other parts of his estimate. Even if he’s has no ill intentions, it’s a natural human response, and he may find himself doing this unconsciously. Get your figures firmly in place before you tell the contractor that you want to do this.

For instance: You want to know exactly how much the contractor wants to charge you for demo’ing the bathroom you want to remodel. Get that exact figure in place. Say, he wants to charge you $2000 for this service. Then, when you tell him that you will do this work, you can rightly expect your estimate to drop $2,000 and to stay dropped.