The Pankian Metaphor 3118

I think you don't understand the trades. Not that I presume to either- but having been under the foot of my wife with her trying to flog along the renovations I can appreciate the reluctance of contractors to deal with all & sundry homeowners. Wealthy people who are unwilling to work on their own houses are probably the worst to deal with.

Lots of electricians wouldn't bother. Lots would but would rather not deal with opinionated homeowners agonizing over every nickle and dime, unpleasant womaning them out for problems they discover and lecturing them about what needs and doesn't need doing.

Look BAH, I live in Baltimore, as old as any city in the US with all the same kinds of issues. Some friends of ours are independent painters who hooked us up with an electrician at one point and floor company at another. Both showed up right on time, did their thing- and the electrician argued us out of hiring him for a $1200 job. These were "in-network people", perfectly willing to work on our old house despite the huge housing developments around Baltimore.

Sadly, our painter friends moved since, we tried their floor suggestion again in December when we had the upstairs floors refninished- since we were out of network we didn't find out till it was too late that the floor company had laid off all their local people and started importing immigrant labor from Virginia (still charging us the same by the way), who did a markedly worse job than the previous guys did and stole a camera while they were in the house. Being in-network would have gotten us warnings... Not that I dislike immigrant labor as such, but these guys were pretty bad. If they had done as good a job as the local guys did previously, I'd have been entirely happy.

Gregm