Silence Shouldn’t Be the Loudest Thing on Your Job Site
It’s 6pm, and you still don’t know what happened in your kitchen today, if anything.
Is it unreasonable to expect somebody on your remodeling team to reach out to you?
In this post, you’ll learn how often Stately Design & Renovation updates you during construction, what a real daily cadence looks like on a Southlake job site, how we handle a problem the day it shows up, and what to ask any renovator before you sign anything.
How Often We Update You During Construction
We reach out to you at least once every working day during construction.
Most days, your project manager is standing in front of you at one point. If not, they’re texting or calling you with updates every single day.
Plenty of our clients hear from theirs more than once a day.
There’s also a walkthrough of the house together every week, so you’re not just getting news; you’re standing in the room looking at the progress.
If you’ve moved out, we set a weekly meeting with you at the house on top of the daily contact, because we call this a partnership and partners meet.
We’ll also tell you about the days you won’t see anybody.
If there’s going to be a day with no one working, we say so ahead of time.
On a whole home renovation in Copper Canyon, the homeowner said: “They communicated with me daily, so I always knew where we were on the build.”
14 months is a long time to not know what’s happening in your own house.
Why Communication, Not Budget, Is the Real Source of Renovation Stress
Stress isn’t about how bad the thing is.
It’s about not being able to do anything about it.
With money, you can act. You get a number, you look at the scope, you cut something, or you don’t, you sign. The decision is yours, and then it’s over.
With silence, there’s no move to make.
You can’t inspect what you can’t see.
You can’t make somebody call you or answer the phone.
Strangers are in your house for months, and the only information channel runs one direction, and it’s theirs.
So you sit with it.
Every day you don’t hear anything, you’re filling that silence yourself, and nobody fills it with good news.
Tori, our office manager, hears the same sentence over and over on calls: “I worked with somebody before, and they just stopped responding to me, and I never heard from them again.”
Rick, our owner, hears people say they got through an entire project and never once laid eyes on their project manager.
We make sure you hear something from us every day so you’re never guessing what’s happening in your home.
How our fixed-price contract reduces your stress.
What Air Traffic Control Project Management Means Day to Day
It means the day already has checkpoints built into it.
Rick Baker didn’t start in remodeling. He started in air traffic control.
Before he founded Stately in 2007, he worked for the Federal Aviation Administration as both an air traffic controller and an IT project manager, and he brought that project management discipline with him into the company.
Here’s what that looks like:
Our project managers and office staff have a morning call where we go through everything.
We also have a check-in at lunchtime, and another one in the afternoon.
Your PM works the same way with your project.
Most mornings he’s the one unlocking your house and meeting the trades who are starting.
He usually checks on them at midday.
Then he comes back in the afternoon before he heads home.
No trade partner gets sent to your job without one of our guys meeting them there first.
We keep a job board in the office that gets updated every week with each project’s start date and how many weeks in we are.
Everybody sees it walking in each morning, so we know whether a job in Colleyville or Keller is on track before the day starts.
The phases of our renovation process.
What Happens When a Problem Surfaces Mid-Project
If a problem comes up during construction, like we open a wall in a Westlake house built in the eighties and find pipes where a door is supposed to be installed, work pauses while we talk about what to do with you.
Your PM meets you in person if he can, so you’re looking at the thing instead of picturing it.
If he can’t get to you, he calls.
Either way, the conversation is the same. Here’s what we found, here’s what it means for the plan you signed off on, and here are your options for dealing with it.
You pick one.
If the fix is something you want done, we price it and get your approval before anybody picks a tool back up.
We won’t just send you a bill for it.
Then the schedule gets updated to reflect the choice you made, and the trades go back to work knowing what they’re building.
How to Hold Any Renovator to This Communication Standard
Ask any company you’re interviewing to commit to 5 things before you sign:
- At least one proactive check-in every working day, started by them.
- One named person who is physically at your house daily and is your single point of contact.
- A schedule laid out by week, updated and re-sent whenever something moves it.
- A written scope detailed enough that a mid-project surprise comes to you as a priced decision needing your approval.
- A person above your project manager you can call.
That last one separates a company from the rest.
If you aren’t getting an answer from your PM, Justin Lindemulder, our senior project manager, comes to your project.
If it’s still not resolved, Rick (the owner) goes to the house himself.
Any remodeler in Southlake, Grapevine, or anywhere else in DFW can tell you they communicate well.
Ask them what happens at 2pm on a Thursday when you have a question, and your PM hasn’t reached back out to you.
Never Guess What’s Happening In Your Home With Stately Design & Renovation
The frequency question is the one worth asking every company you interview: how often will I hear from you, and who starts that conversation?
You should be getting an answer every working day from a named person who was standing in your house, without having to ask for it.
If that’s the dedication you want on your project, fill out our contact form or give us a call today.
